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Thursday, 10 July 2008 (no quarter) 7:09pm I saw my doctor this afternoon, and it was demoralizing as I expected it to be. Gods, but he's such a fracking chode. I'd known going in that we were going to discuss lowering my estrogen dosage. And I'd already decided that I wasn't going to fight him about it, either. As of this September I'll have been on hormones for ten years, and, really, they've done what they're going to do. I'm not going off them, not ever, but this is all there is to a fire, y'know? It's not like a higher dosage is going to make a hell of a lot of difference. So, fine. Whatever. Lower them. Silly me for thinking that immediately capitulating would make him any less of a condescending dickweed. For starters, he asked if I'd been on estrogen before I started seeing him last year. My jaw practically hit the ground, yet I wasn't surprised, since from the start that he'd disregarded the nine years' worth of medical records I'd brought in charting my hormonal history and acted like I was some schmuck who'd just wandered in off the street. I worked it into conversation that it'll be ten years in September, but he didn't acknowledge it, giving me the same smug look as ever. (Only Vash ever witnessed it.) (And I so wanted to call her when I got out of the appointment to vent, but there are bad ideas and there are phenomenally bad ideas, and this fell into the latter category.) Bleh. I told him that my main concern was the emotional effect of my hormone levels changing. The pigfracker actually tried to get all Aesop on my ass, telling me a story about someone else on 'mones who was getting her prescription by mail, and how for some reason it never showed up, and she kept getting more nervous and neurotic about it, and then when it finally showed up all her anxieties went away. Rather than hissing and spitting on him, I tried to kindly explain that he was missing the godsdamned point entirely, that my concern about emotional effects was not about running out of the hormones, but that in my ten years of shifting employment and insurance situations and having to bounce from doctor to doctor I have a lot of experience in my hormone intake changing, and I know from first-hand experience that it can really fuck with my emotions. I emphasized that I've been on hormones for a decade and as a result have some idea how they effect me, but it didn't matter to him. Why do I keep seeing him? Because finding this guy was a daunting enough task, and I still haven't learned my lesson about staying in bad relationships. I wish I could just go to the Waddell Clinic, though my favorite doctor there is gone. Same with my doctor at Kaiser, the trannychaser. Maybe I'm developing abandonment issues with my doctors. Except for the one who's a total fracking asshole, him, he sticks around. ...oh, but what about my doctor in San Jose, the one I had to stop seeing when I got shitcanned from CNET? Maybe she's still in business. I hadn't given her much thought these past few years because I didn't trust the Neon to make the drive, but Phoebe's totally up for it. Okay, yeah. This is worth investigating. I'll totally drive to San Jose for a doctor who'll treat me with a little respect. | ||
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Wednesday, 9 July 2008 (finalizing the details) 11:15am The slate is clean, oh my yes. As planned, after Playtime (which I enjoyed, but is going to take a long time to process) I came to the office and cleaned and packed and stripped the walls. My space is now devoid of personality except for the blacklight lamp next to my monitor, and the kittypr0n and soma fm bumper stickers on the back of the monitor. Beyond that, I'm good to go. We won't be going until Monday at the earliest, but better safe and all. Besides, Officer Dave warned us that Tim was likely to get cranky at people with messy workspaces today, and, really, I don't need that. I wound up staying later than I'd intended, until about half past one, since Phoebe got blocked in by clubkid chodes downstairs. I'm pretty good at keeping busy, though. 6:58pm Sometimes San Francisco gets so damn meta. I'm at The Dark Room right now, working the door for a college class which has rented out the theater to watch a movie. It hadn't been planned that I would be working the door tonight. It just ended up that way, which is fine by me. The movie in question is Susan Stryker's Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton's Cafeteria, about the heavy persecution of trannies in San Francisco in the sixties and how we eventually fought back. Beyond the fact that Susan was one of the people I recruited to host the Tranny Stage last year (which isn't that remarkable, since it's a small community), the overall coincidence goes to show how much things have improved in the past forty years. These kids are still just learning about transsexuals, and lo and behold, one of them greets them at the door, just because it's where she (that is, me) spends a lot of her time when she's not at her cushy office job. And they all take in stride. If that ain't progress, I don't know what is. 8:23pm "you're not my yoko ono" | ||
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Tuesday, 8 July 2008 (when morning comes to town) 12:46pm My replacement computer at work is up and running. They were able to salvage the important hard drive from the old system, so I lost very little, mostly just browser settings and the like. Hooray for small miracles. As I requested—and as the computer asplosion proved to be necessary for backup purposes—I now have a DVD-RW drive. I intend to use it for good and not for evil. Mostly. Speaking of evil—so, Johanna came over last night. (That's not the evil part.) It's the first time I've had anyone over for the past few months, as when I'm hanging out with Ennui or Ilene I tend to prefer to crash at their places. That also makes it the first time that I've not had my earplugs in and headphones on (thumpthumpthumpTHUMPTHUMPTHUMPthumpthumpthump) and that I could be heard talking to another person. In other words, it was obvious that I was home and doing things. Which meant that there would inevitably be a knock on the door. It was while Johanna and I were sitting on the ground in front of my couch, eating the Indian food she brought. I ignored them at first. And then some more. The more they knocked, the more I ignored them. I don't have to talk to them, or anyone, if I don't want to. And this wasn't like when I called my landlord because they kept bogarting the laundry machines, either. I hadn't done anything wrong, and aside from having company over, I wasn't being loud. To hell with them. Finally, the woman pleaded: sherilyn, i just want to ask you a question. At that, I finally broke. Frack it. Get it over with. I went to the door and opened it. The woman said that one of her bikes was missing from the garage. I tensed up, fully ready to rip into her for accusing me of stealing, but she then merely asked if the gate was open when I'd gotten home. I told her it wasn't, because it wasn't. And that was that. Heaven forfrackingbid I have someone over. Not answering the door again for them, ever. Part of me hopes they bring it up to my landlord, try to imply that I was responsible somehow. The potential lulz are extreme. The rest of the evening was nice. Johanna really enjoyed 1941, and we drank Yellowtail Shiraz-Cabernet which I bought largely because the label was pretty. I don't have any other criteria to work with, really. | ||
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Monday, 7 July 2008 (one at a time) 10:16am Given what my mom calls "my druthers," I like to be the first one in the office. Since I didn't get to bed until around two last night, I decided to let myself just sleep however long I would sleep. The net result was that I awoke at eight, and because of erranding, didn't make it to work until ten. (I wrote Officer Dave to let him know I was running late, and since it's so rare that I'm late, it was no problem.) This meant that my archnemesis and her minions were already in place when I arrived, of course, which is among the reasons I like to get here first. But sometimes the gauntlet must be walked, and that's okay. I still have a love-buzz from Rhiannon and Sean and Alexia and Mikl-Em joining me for all three and a half hours of Lawrence of Arabia in 70MM at the Castro yesterday. My friends matter. Those who aren't, don't. 3:10pm I remain on my laptop at the office, as my work computer hasn't been replaced yet. Considering that this is our big packing-for-the-move week, I doubt that it's anybody's priority. And that's okay. My workspace is comparatively minimalist, so actual packing will only take a few mintues. The real trick will be taking down the stuff from the walls, which I'm planning on doing tomorrow night (after seeing Jacques Tati's Playtime in 70MM at The Castro with Mikl-Em). I prefer not to be observed when I decorate or un-decorate. It's just how I am. Tonight The Castro is showing The Wild Bunch in 70MM—it's part of their 70MM festival, y'see, which I've been enjoying a great deal—but I'll be giving it a miss. Instead, Johanna's coming over for the first time in several months. We're going to have dinner and watch Spielberg's 1941. Not in 70MM. 3:47pm Oh, right. I knew today was some sort of meaningless anniversary, and I've finally remembered what it was: six years ago today, I read at K'vetch for the first time. It got me serious about my writing again, which set a whole hell of a lot of things in motion, most of them good and none of which I would change. | ||
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Sunday, 6 July 2008 (hemisphere switchback) sometime after midnight Back home. I honestly hadn't intended to be away from here since Friday morning. I figured I would stay out at The Dark Room on Friday night, which I did, but I figured I'd return to the Black Light District on Saturday night. Except I was in no condition to drive, so I crashed at The Dark Room again and showered there so I wouldn't have to come back here. I always make sure Perdita has a full dish of food, fresh water and a scooped box when I leave, so she was fine when I got here, not starving or dying of thirst. She was desperately in need of love, but, well, that's nothing new, since she is my daughter. She gets it from my side of the family. | ||
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Saturday, 5 July 2008 (hymn to a mechanical god) 12:11pm It was just Bunny and I at the movies last night. Well, Bunny and I and a nearly packed house, which surprised the hell out of me for the Fourth of July, what with it being a couple of decades-old geek movies. But there's a lot of geeks in this town, and it was a cold and foggy Fourth. Bunny had never seen either movie, though she loved them both. She's also told me that she's ridiculously easy with movies: sit her down in front of anything, and she'll love it. (Though she couldn't make it all the way through Southland Tales. Very few could.) I've seen Tron more than once, of course—I think it'll be my next Medialoper article, even though I don't want to distract myself from my book—and I still maintain that I may be the only person in existence who has a Tron poster in their bedroom yet still gets laid. Granted, these last six months have been unintentionally chaste, but that's not the poster's fault. I'd never seen Brainstorm before. It was one of those movies I read about in Starlog as a kid, but when I tried to watch it on VHS it took about five minutes to realize that it really needed to be seen in a theater. It took twenty-five years. I'm nothing if not patient. I was reminded at times of the main problem with seeing older movies at The Castro, the reason why I don't see Hitchcock or most black and white films there: the audience is all about their ironic laughter. Tron was asking for it in some ways, with a script that bandies about now-quaint technological terms without having the foggiest idea what they mean, but for some people everything in it was rife with comic possibilities. One fellow sitting in in the row ahead of us, who looked like an Isaac Asimov wannabe complete with the muttonchops, literally slapped his knee and laughed at a simple establishing shot. This may sound hypocritical from the curator of Bad Movie Night, but context is everything. Alas. I returned to The Dark Room to crash, had a plantain breakfast with Jim this morning at the El Salvador Restaurant across the street, and am now trying to get some writing done before going to a barbecue at the Goldies'. It's a full life. | ||
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Friday, 4 July 2008 (when the plane took off) 2:06pm Wasn't on Puzzling Evidence's show last night—it'll happen eventually, I'm sure—but I rip, edit and upload to YouTube a video of my reading at The Drug Diaries on November 19, 2005. The first three and a half minutes are my rambly, largely improvised intro, mostly working from notes which I'd jotted down right before going on stage. I seem to recall getting more laughs from it than the video suggests, and I'm going to continue to believe that. It was also during my brief experiment of growing out my bangs, which is the only reason I can think that I was shaking my head so damn much, especially since I was stone cold sober. Honest. I'm at The Dark Room right now, and tonight I'm hooking up with Bunny and possibly others for a double feature of Tron and Brainstorm at The Castro. It's going to be a fair shake better than the Fourth of July last year, which was a lonely and miserable evening. If nothing else, I deal better with loneliness now than I did then. I think. Maybe. Or not. | ||
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Thursday, 3 July 2008 (realms of study) 1:08pm It's nothing millions of fairly dull people before me haven't already figured out how to do, but I've finally learned how to rip a DVD to mpeg4, and then upload it to YouTube. Go me. All I've been able to upload so far is that video which Puzzling Evidence shot of the Drive-Out Theater Superhero Skating trip from last January (in which me, Ennui, Bunny, Chicken and KrOB can all be seen at times), mainly because it's the only thing I've had handy at work which was short and at all relevant, but it's a start. Now I just have to dig up the other stuff at home, and—scary!—learn to how to convert VHS. | ||
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Wednesday, 2 July 2008 (the dead flag blues) 5:30pm At Caffe Trieste, getting some writing done before going to Ilene's to continue watching Battlestar Galactica with her. Since we're watching together, it slows the process down some. Pete and Sarah Goldie, on the other hand, are watching it at their own pace and have just finished the second season. In fact, it turns out I got to Bad Movie Night on Sunday just a few minutes after Pete had shown up and subsequently left. Rhiannon called him and told him I made it, so came back to The Dark Room and asked me to go up front and grab a microphone so he could use his megaphone (it's his thing) and ask me questions from the back row: so, if there's a sharon on cylon-occupied caprica with helo and a sharon on the ship who's having an affair with tyrol, then how... It was funny to us, anyway, which is kinda all that matters. My work computer had been officially declared fried. It wasn't anything I could have seen coming. The power supply just up and died, because that's what things do. They break. Thus far we haven't had much luck rescuing the data from my hard drives, especially the stuff on F: with my last three years' worth of office work and passwords and such, not to mention the personal stuff. Nothing is truly irreplaceable—like I said, all my writing is backed up, and that's what means the most to me—but I'm really hoping I can recover it. If not, well, c'est la vie. Things break, they fall apart, and if any of the rumors I've been hearing are true, the second half of 2008 is going to be a major reshuffle. I can't really picture what June 2009 is going to look like, and that's okay. It's part of the adventure. Speaking of times changing, specifically of a time when Vash and I were solid together and Maddy and I were still speaking to each other, I came across a DVD last night of The Gong Show Live! at The Dark Room from February 4, 2006. I was a "celebrity guest host" that night along with Dave McKew and Mikl-Em. It's coincidentally been on my mind lately because I need to put together a more complete curriculum vitae that just my existing readings page. Which ain't bad, as it lists over two hundred performances from the past six years, but it's still incomplete. I need to put together a better demo reel, too. Or one at all. I have various bits of video floating around from assorted shows, and Puzzling Evidence tells me has a bunch of stuff he's shot over the years. (It occurs to me that I don't have work on Friday, being a holiday and all. Which means, in theory, that I can do his show on Thursday night, provided I don't mind severe sleep dep on Friday. Hrm.) Anyway, the video happened to be shot right next to me, so I'm frequently in the foreground, capturing many of my nutty madcap hijinx!, which were both some of the trickiest things I've ever done—the pressure to be funny on the spot was intense—and some of the most rewarding. In any event, it's time to push the career forward, and one of the ways to do that is an ample record of stuff I've done. And even if the career goes no farther, it's nice to have the evidence that I've worked hard. Maybe my mom will be proud of it. | ||
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Tuesday, 1 July 2008 (roll another number) 8:02am Though my archnemesis was not in the office when I arrived this morning at a quarter to eight—that'll learn 'em!—my work computer appears to be fried. July is not getting off to an auspicious start, but at least I didn't get ticketed for driving while talking on my cell phone. Of course, it helps that I didn't use my phone while driving this morning. 12:42pm According to the IT guy—who's actually quite sweet, unlike his predecessor the troll—my computer's power supply is dead, and may have taken the main hard drive with it. If so, I'll need a new system altogether. Whee. Fortunately, all of my writing is also on my laptop and on the Ossuary server, and on a personal level that's only the truly irreplaceable stuff. (A lot of audio and video will be lost, but, well, easy come, easy go.) A couple years' worth of work-related documents would also be kaput, and that'll hurt, but I'll manage. All the important material would have been backed up, but I got the computer in question during the troll's reign, and so it didn't have burning capability. Trolls are like that. Meanwhile, at least I'm getting some work done on the book. Not a whole hell of a lot else I can do. | ||
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