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Wednesday, 16 April 2003 (the last blue before black) 6:32pm Superficial changes to compensate for a certain emptiness. Sometimes it can be done, and sometimes I run smack into myself. On the other hand, just shy of a week later, my face is healed up (as healed up as it gets), and there hasn't been any regrowth yet. I just hope it stays like this for, say, another month and a week. So TNN, which was originally The Nashville Network and then became The National Network when Viacom bought it a couple years back, is now changing its name to "Spike." (There's no graceful way to make a Buffy reference, so I won't try.) As the best marketing does, it's filling a niche which doesn't even exist, positing itself as "the first network specifically aimed at men." According to the AP story, the network president chose "Spike" because he thought having a guy's name would be "smart and fun and irreverent." Dingdingding! Buzzword Alert! If the word "irreverent" is used, you can bet something's being marketed towards the all-important 18-35 male demographic. Except that "Spike" isn't irreverent. "Jesus Getting Squicked" is irreverent. "A Burning Flag Shoved Down George W. Bush's Throat," in addition to being a swell idea, is irreverent. There's a difference. This sort of thing is why we cancelled cable, and probably would have done so even if we were both still gainfully employed. Giving these people money, even indirectly by simply subscribing at all, just encourages this sort of thing. Fuck them. Last | Top | Next

Tuesday, 15 April 2003 (while we can) 7:23pm Tax Day. Though I've long since filed mine, I'm still trying not think about what the money's being used for. In an actual democracy, taxpayers would actually have some say in it. Not holding my breath on that one. Last | Top | Next

Monday, 14 April 2003 (words without a song) sometime after midnight Oh, hell. I've been called in for jury duty again, this time under the proper name. I've got a bad feeling about this. On the plus side, a twelve year-old girl who was clearly waiting for someone asked me if my name is Roxanne Mah. My face is still healing up and I wasn't wearing a hint of makeup, but even under the best of circumstances it's nice to think I look like a Roxanne Mah. (No doubt the only description they had to work with was "tall with long black hair.") Last | Top | Next

Sunday, 13 April 2003 (this way through) 1:12pm I've lived in this city long enough to know better: unless you're absolutely certain about the location of where you're going, always write down the address first. It didn't help that I didn't know that Mission Grounds recently changed its name, but at least I would have known exactly where it used to be, and wouldn't have wandered around like quite as much of an idiot. Never a good thing before a meeting, especially with people you don't know. Bad first impression. The meeting in question was with the people who organize the readings at Adobe. Shauna, (e) and I have been talking about having do a reading there, and Adobe is receptive to the idea. It'll probably be in June, well after my trip to the Midwest, and possibly close to my thirtieth birthday. There certainly is potential. Last | Top | Next

Saturday, 12 April 2003 (media weather) 9:14am I saw a newspaper headline yesterday which said the U.S. had taken some oil wells. Yay! Does that mean the Iraqi people are liberated now? Woohoo! We're number one! Take that, Osama! 4:21pm We saw three 35mm narrative feature films in movie theaters yesterday, which is more than tend to go to in a month. We watch a lot of them at home on DVD, but usually when we go to a movie, they're usually either a documentary, shot on digital video, both. They were Rob Zombie's long-delayed House of 1,000 Corpses, David Cronenberg's Spider, and some unpatriotic French person's He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not. The last two were in double feature at the Four Star, which meant relatively cheap tickets, no previews and no commercials. Corpses was the gamble, being in a mainstream movie theater, one of which we haven't been in since The Big Game back in January. We got there as the commercials were running. My god, they're so very very very LOUD. The trailers, too. Why? Is it just me? Are they at an acceptable level for everyone else, and I'm just too old? Anyway, as for the other inherent danger of going to a horror movie on opening day (a loud, obnoxious audience), we got pretty lucky. It was early in the afternoon, and there were maybe only a dozen or so other people in the theater. Oddly, the couple closest to us kept quiet until about twenty minutes before the end, when they started loudly commenting on everything. Maybe they realized, hey! this is a movie theater, not a library! what're we keepin' quiet for? Like, when a sign with the words "Truck Route" appeared in the background, the guy said the words aloud. Hell, who needs Harry Potter? Reading is alive and well in America! Meanwhile, my face is healing up quicker than I'd expected. It's still read and bumpy around the mouth, but it's already regained its original shape. Which is a good thing, more or less. Last | Top | Next

Friday, 11 April 2003 (all the feel of real things) 8:03am I've got a harelip. Well, not quite. But close. My upper lip is visibly puffy, and I can feel it pressing against my gums. Under nomal circumstances it would be distressing, but I'm taking it to be a good sign. It means my new electrologists are doing their job. By coordinated universal time standards, I only had about a little over two hours of zapping done yesterday; enough for the entirety of Jonathan Colecough and Andrew Chalk's Sumac, Brian Eno's Thursday Afternoon and most of the first track of Coil's Time Machines. (My old guy wouldn't have had the patience for music so slow and unmelodic.) Two people were working at a time, though, so the net result was nearly five hours, bringing me up to 237 hours altogether. The second real-time hour of work was my idea; they were prepared to stop since I'd already endured a lot, but I wanted my face to be cleared of all the dark hairs, so they continued. By that time the vicodin had worn off and I probably should have taken another, but I didn't want to lose the momentum. Double-barreled is really the only way to go with electrolysis, and I wish I'd been doing it this way ever since I switched endocrinologists. (But I wish a lot of things. I wish I wasn't pushing thirty yet still getting my shit together genderwise, that I'd had the intestinal wherewithal to come out as a teenager and get started then. Of course, the pushback would have been tremendous, even moreso than it was when it finally did happen in my mid-twenties. I doubt it would have been taken seriously when I was younger, and it could have all gone badly, one more note of drama to add to the opera that was my family in the late eighties. Not to mention the potential "dead in a shallow ditch" thing. Being a self-sufficient adult physically removed from my family was an absolute necessity for me. And yet. And yet.) There may even be a chance in hell that there won't be much regrowth before we arrive in the Midwest. A snowball's chance, perhaps, but a chance nonetheless. Last | Top | Next

Thursday, 10 April 2003 (in your hands now) sometime after midnight Sometimes I can't see a thing through all the dust kicked up by my spinning wheels. Last | Top | Next

Wednesday, 9 April 2003 (the new black) 1:02pm The kittypr0n Walpurgisnacht Special will be on April 30 at 8pm. Plan your goat sacrifices accordingly. K'vetch didn't go so well this last Sunday. Oh, the show itself was terrific, if a little longer than usual. I just can't shake the feeling that I sucked horribly. Odds are if you asked anyone there they'd probably tell you I did fine, but hey, that's what friends are for. I read the same piece I'd read at Oral Fixation a couple weeks back, and it didn't do as well. It didn't feel right. My introduction was as long as rambly as before, and, indeed, that was when I got the best response, a round of applause when I mentioned the anonymous phone caller who said I'd be responsible for America losing the next war. In any event, I don't think I'll be reading that piece again. For me, the high point of the evening was talking to David West before K'vetch began. We exchanged chapbooks, and he purchased a kittypr0n tape, saying he was certain his brother would love it. (I've noticed that the majority of people who buy tapes—and, admittedly, it's a "majority" of a very small number—are getting them for other people. I like that a lot.) We went outside so he could smoke, and he told me about protesting the war and getting duly arrested. As if the man wasn't already my hero. Of course, none of this is new to him; a Commie from way back, and a card-carrying one for a number of years (actually, he may still have it in his wallet for all I know), he's been involved in his share of protests and demonstrations and has quite a few arrests on his record, mostly for civil disobedience. You wouldn't guess it to look at him, though. Just goes to show, it's the clean-cut ones you have to watch out for. Last | Top | Next

Tuesday, 8 April 2003 (reemergence) 11:17am Well, that sucked. Our desktop computer has been more or less down since last Tuesday, and after no small amount of running around and time spent on hold and a great deal of bloodying our foreheads (long story short: HP doesn't offer any kind of replacement for the Pavilion's power supply, especially since our warranty expired last month), it's all better now. Our backup laptop came in very handy, especially for researching the problem with the desktop, but evidently it didn't inspire me to write much. Perhaps it was because of the extra effort involved in setting up the laptop, I don't know. After having reached the conclusion that I need to get my face cleared of dark hair before our trip to the Midwest next month (I've mentioned we're going to the Midwest next month, haven't I?), I went to the new electrologists last Thursday. Not a full-on session, just twenty minutes or so to see how we worked together. It went well; they described me as being "very strong-willed," since I didn't (noticeably) squirm or complain about how much it hurt. Which was a hell of a lot, since I hadn't taken any vicodin, they didn't use a topical painkiller, I had two electrified needles at work on me at a time rather than one, there was no music, and even with my eyes closed and covered the lights were very bright. I simply relaxed and concentrated on breathing normally, and since there was no way to distract myself from it or pretend it wasn't happening, ruminated on the sensation of undiluted electrolysis. Someday, I suspect depilation (reliably permanent, which laser is not) will be a much faster process, perhaps almost instanteous; the current technology feels like it's in extreme slow motion. Anybody who is ever skeptical about what I'm doing with my life, those of the "Have you really thought about what you're doing?" mindset (usually straight people having difficulty wrapping their minds around the concept, and thus assume that nobody in their right mind would be uncomfortable with their birth gender) should go under the needle for just a few minutes and then try to fathom that I've willingly had over two hundred hours done. If that doesn't make me deadly serious, I don't know what does. I have an appointment this Thursday for a longer session, from one and a half to three hours. It'll be expensive, but I have a feeling that come next month, it'll be worth it. Last | Top | Next

Wednesday, 2 April 2003 (the parts that show) 4:07pm No April Fool's Day entry, thanks to computer problems which aren't over yet. Not that we were home much yesterday anyhow. Maddy had to be at the courthouse at nine in the morning for a name-change hearing, which went without a hitch. (At long last, she's dumping the ex-husband's emotionally loaded and somewhat unpronounceable last name.) She still has to go to the DMV to get a new license, and then actually spread the word about it, but otherwise she's done with the legal aspects of it. While the hearing itself went without a hitch, we still had to do a bit of bouncing around the courthouse to get a certified copy of the official document, primarily because of a profound yet unsurprising lack of communication between different departments of the Court. Joining us were a couple other dykes coincidentally getting their names changed as well and encountering the same problems. One of them mentioned an event that night which sounded too good to miss: an April Fool's Day "Pro-War" Parade. Fueled both by curiosity and a certain degree of guilt for not having really participated in the resistance so far, we went, and it was sublime. It consisted of dirty unpatriotic hippies such as ourselves pretended to be good upstanding citizens who want nothing more than to drive SUVs and kick Iraqi ass. (One of my favorite signs read "Bin Laden Out Of Iraq." I wonder how many people agree with that sentiment.) In addition to not getting beaten or arrested by the ever-present police, the best part was the confused look of the people on the street, who simply didn't know what to make of it. Some booed and some cheered, and I don't think any of them were entirely sure if that was the correct response or not. Ah, street theater. So there's a joke that's been making the rounds, usually being forwarded by people like Maddy's mother—I only use her as an example because she did in fact forward it—to the effect that K-Mart and Wal-Mart stores in Iraq will become Targets. (I have no idea if those chains do in fact exist in Iraq. Probably doesn't matter.) Maybe I just need to lighten up, but I wonder if the people who find that funny are also the ones who are towing the government's li(n)e about how every effort is being made to spare Iraqi civilian lives. They probably don't see the contradiction there, that destroying retail stores filled with innocent people isn't going to get Saddam Hussein or effect "regime change." Ugh. Is it any wonder the rest of the world, more and more, hates this country? Yeah, I know. It's a joke. I need to lighten up. Last | Top | Next