Old Home Week

Thank you all for your very nice anniversary messages. It isn't exactly a Big Day for me--I watched the dreary "Assassination of Richard Nixon," bought a Barbara Ehrenreich book and the "Diary of Anne Frank," and had some leftover butter chicken for dinner.

But on the other hand it's kind of a big deal, which I think my post conveyed.

I'm going to try and revisit some topics of note this week on the blog. But not tonight; I'm beat. However, in the meantime, if you've ever wondered, why isn't C.L. on Facebook? Well, now she is. Drop on by and become a fan, if you're so inclined.

Me and My Vagina, Special Anniversary Edition: Part II of an Infinitely Reductive Series

Today is the anniversary of my surgery. In fact, as I type this now, I am about a year removed from my first full day of having a vagina--Thailand being twelve hours ahead of my local time, and the six or more hours of my surgery having started at noon Bangkok time. (I don't remember how long the surgery lasted, as I slept through it and for a long time afterwards, only waking up for a brief moment to say goodnight to my significant other of variable and often fabulous gender.)

In fact, there's almost a week of time that I have very little recollection of--the five days I had to stay immobile in bed, according to my surgeon's regimen. Not everyone does this; had I gone to the Canadian surgeon I first considered, I'd have been up and walking around after about a day or so. Everybody does things differently. But I'm somewhat glad for being immobile; during that five days I only moved once, and that was because I'd thrown up on myself the first day after my surgery--juice boxes and opiates don't agree all that well. The only way to get me clean sheets was to move me to an entirely new bed. Which meant I had to crab walk over to it. Now, even under normal circumstances, that would be both uncomfortable and ungraceful; but I had to not only contend with the pain from my brand-new down there, with the attendant catheter and surgical drains, but since I'd also opted to have my boobs done at the same time, I could barely move my arms; the surgeon went in under my armpits, and to be honest that pain was more omnipresent and inconveniencing than the other.

But other than that, and my SOOVAOFG saying goodbye to me to fly home--we'd spent ten days together bumping around India and Cambodia prior to my surgery, and vacation time is precious nowadays--I really don't remember much. I slept a lot; I was too out of it to even watch TV. Every so often, they'd bring me a thick creamy soup and some juice boxes to eat and drink. I rarely ate the soup, but I drank the juice. (As an aside, Thai sweets of all kinds tend to be sweeter than American sweets--probably because they use real sugar.) I've come to realize that it wasn't so much that I was drugged out of my head--Thais don't practice American pain management, and I didn't even have a morphine drip--but because nothing changed. There was me; my bed; my room with the blinds drawn; and the occasional ministrations of kind Thai nurses who spoke little English. (My Thai was suspect at its best and no match for my pain and grogginess.)

But eventually they packed me up and sent me home, after giving me a huge, cumbersome, old-fashioned bra. It was trimmed with lace and looked like something from the "18-hour bra" commercials I'd seen as a kid. And then I was dumped back in my hotel room, just me and my catheter bag--they didn't take the catheter out until the next day, which was a little scary and gross. On the other hand, it was pretty convenient for lying in bed and drinking stuff, which was about all I was up for.

But it's surprising how quickly you can heal. I was moving around the hotel room that, night, had enough energy to make breakfast the next day, and even hosted a pizza party for some of the other patients of my surgeon a day or so after that. (We had a couple of these affairs. They were interesting; we'd have a great time for about an hour, and then everyone would be in too much pain to continue. But they were fun while they lasted.)

That was all a year ago.

Things have changed. For one thing, I now only have to dilate once a day for about 30 minutes. That will mean I can actually get up at the same time but still get to work earlier, which will help me have more time and energy to write in the evening. I've had sex, by which I mean--this being America and all--PIV sex, so now I know how much I've been missing. My recovery has been remarkably hassle free, even with the UTI I developed a month after getting home.

There's more, of course, much more. But how can I put it all in words? There are days when I forget that I never had a vagina, and there are days when I forget for a second that I do. There are many days when I am astonished by the miracle of it all, and many more days when I simply take it for granted. And most of all, I feel like what I am supposed to be. I feel like a woman.

And I felt that way before. I am not going to play pussy politics with you and engage in zero-sum games about the proper anatomy a woman needs. It's reductive, and cruel, and ignores the economic reality of far too many trans women.

But there's no question that I like myself better this way, that I feel a peace with my body I never felt before. That I had to wound myself to heal.

Not that I'm completely healed. None of us, I suppose, ever really can be--and I'm not just talking about trans people. If we measure lives by ideals, then we're all a little broken, all in need of some kind of healing. And I've come so very far.

But there are still times when I resent that passage; when I resent all the things that were taken from me, all the things that I never had--even the bad things, even the things that in a sense I was fortunate enough to miss: if I feel the omnipresent judgment of every damn TV commercial on how I should look, act, think, and feel simply because of my gender, can I really long to have had that drummed into my head from the moment it poked into our world? Do I really feel sorry for myself for not having spent three and a half decades as a victim of sexism?

No. Not really. But I do regret the necessity of it all, the long slow struggle to find out who I am, the summoning up of awful reserves of energy just to survive each day, and then the ultimate effort to make myself into the person I desperately needed to be. And so I regret that passage; but I am grateful, oh so very grateful, to have survived it.

And you could say, maybe, that my vagina is a symbol of that: a physical manifestation of not just my womanhood, but my struggle to achieve that womanhood, a signpost showing how far I've come and how much I had to undergo to reach it. I suppose that would be fine; I'd hardly be the first woman to eulogize my vagina, and I doubt I'll be the last, cis or trans.

But I don't really do that much. Because most of the time it's just a vagina. And believe me, that is more than enough. In fact, it's perfect.

Songs of Love and Hate, and Mascara

Sady at Tiger Beatdown has been running guest posts on breakup songs in honor of Valentines Day, and was kind enough to ask me to write one. So I did, and it's over here. I wrote it on Leonard Cohen, who you might have guessed is my favorite songwriter, but of course I touched on other stuff. Trans stuff! (I know, I know, jeez lady can't you ever not talk about that?) But it was an interesting assignment and I ended up getting personal in a way I don't always do even over here, so you might find it good reading. Meanwhile I'll hang out here muttering the "Dress Rehearsal Rag" to myself.

The Dilemma Of Having a Long Tail

Now, ducks, before you think that I mean that my surgeon had some, er, interesting ideas about anatomy, by a long tail I just mean: I have a past. It was not particularly unaccomplished, although--duh--it wasn't exactly fulfilled. But I did some cool things, was on (syndicated) TV a few times, got married, got divorced, wrote a couple dozen books, learned to speak French, even learned a little aikido.

Oh, the books? Yeah, you might have guessed that's what I wanted to talk about.

Now, before you search the ISBN catalog (and begin speculation that I am actually John Irving, finally over his castration issues), let me hasten to say: as writing goes, this was pretty assembly-line stuff. I wrote, mostly as work-for-hire, not-quite-textbooks. For 8th graders.

I say not-quite textbooks because they weren't text books: that is, you wouldn't teach a class using them. Instead, these were the books you'd read to do a book report on, say, Gold. (I didn't write one on gold, but I kinda wish I had--it was more interesting than some of the stuff I did write about.)

Now, I'm telling you all this because a few months ago I got something from my publisher. I was rather astonished--it couldn't be a royalty check, those dried up years ago. But I was even more surprised when I read what was inside:

Fan mail.

It seems that a young boy had read my book about a famous sports figure of the previous century, and written me a letter.

Well, not me exactly.

Me, just before. The other me. The...aw, you get the picture.

So, I've been trying to figure out what to do with this: it was a nice letter, though it asks some interesting questions (did I play football as a boy, for example), and rather charmingly lets me know how cool it would be for an author to write back to him.

But--and this is the dilemma of me and my tail--how on earth do I go about this? Write back using my old name? No offense, but I hate having to do that; I still have a few accounts under my old name and I never call their customer service anymore, because I'd have to....it's too gruesome to contemplate.

Or do I write back and say that Old Name was a pseudonym (not exactly a lie) and I'd be happy to correspond but I am, you know, a girl. Not super honest, but maybe more palatable.

Or do I do evangelism? Say, hey kid, here's an update about me: and maybe open his mind up to queer and other possibilities? Is that too heavy to dump on a kid? Sheesh, I don't even know how old he is!

(Hmm, maybe I could write to his parents. Hadn't thought of that.)

Anyway, I've been going back and forth about this; I've kept the letter pegged to my apartment door, so I see it every time I leave. And it was a nice letter, and maybe deserves a response.

Then I realized: hey, I have a smart readership. Small, but smart: you guys are like the elite core of my future dominance of a tiny little corner of the trans internet! So, I thought I'd ask you all to weigh in, ducks: I put it up as a poll at the upper right. Or answer in the comments. Or ignore the question--trust me, I sympathize.

Where In The World Is C.L. Minou?

Well, for once, back here.

I do apologize, ducks. This has been a slightly weird week: I mean, I was in the Guardian, and the Carnival, and also work was busy (I was doing stuff at 10 pm on Tuesday) and oh yeah it was my birthday yesterday and so I had to go out and have drinks with my girlfriends (and one of their boyfriends: he was our Designated Boy.) And then back to work but oh yeah, my enormous cat, Fafhrd, the Grey Mouser, has been sick and I had to take him to the vet, which will set back my primary financial mission for 2010, the Payinge Off Of Ye Ginormous Credite Carde Debte.

So: I know! Wild!

The other thing is my job. I'm glad I have it and it's mostly not particularly hard (even if they're paying me a lot less than I'm used to), and it's cool to be able to work from home--but after spending over ten hours at my desk, I tend to be a little too burned out to sit down and write. At least this week. I think that will sort out eventually.

But there will be more stuff, eventually! Here and at Tiger Beatdown. I have some thoughts about the whole Bindel thing and Second Wave radical feminism that ties into kyriarchy nicely. And I will eventually write something about "Heathers." Also, Sophie had a really good comment that tied into my post on Mary Daly and I just want you to know, Sophie, that I noticed! And have been thinking about it! And will, one of these days, write about it!

So, stay tuned, you who tune in. And if you're not tuning in, why not try? Although, given that you're not tuning in, I'm not so sure how it is you'll hear me ask you to tune in. But it all comes out in the wash.

A Purloined Girlhood Part 1a: Wild at Heart

Hey, where am I today? Over at Tiger Beatdown!

I saw “Where the Wild Things Are” this weekend, ducks. (One of the advantages of living in the Great American Metropolis is that movies tend to hang around a surprising length of time.)

I saw it because of Spike Jonze, and because I am just old enough to have grown up in the Golden Age of Maurice Sendak — that hazy, golden late afternoon in America when Sesame Street had become established, the children raised by Dr. Spock were raising their own children, and Sendak and Shel Silverstein dominated the bookcases of every “with it” parent. (I was too young to say things like “with it,” of course, but I had teenaged cousins, and was vaguely aware of things like The Disco… we are talking about that point in history when The Captain and Teneille had their own TV show, people.) It was an age brought to you by CTW.

 Vamanos!

How To Tell You've Transitioned, Part II

I had a kinda frantic day today--spent all day trying to get some SQL to behave correctly, even though the task should have been pretty easy to do. Plus I was late for my therapy appointment--even with catching a cab.

As I was coming up out of the subway, a panhandler asked me for some money; and as I was walking away, he said "You have a nice day ma'am--sir--ma'am." (I'm assuming he saw either my boobs or my lipstick and that pushed him over the edge.)

I wasn't particularly happy to hear that, but I wasn't terrifically surprised either. I was dressed for work, when you work from home: a black tee, jeans, and sneakers. As I was walking away, I thought to myself, you've forgotten how to be a girl.

I am much less enlightened in the dark recesses of my mind than I am in print.

But there has been a change in how I present myself over the two years of my fulltime life; there was a time when I always wore eye makeup when I went out, and gave much careful thought to what I was going to wear. Nowadays, not so much; I've even gone out without wearing any lipstick, something I'd been avoiding ever since I got read when not wearing it.

A little of this is the weight I've put on, and being too broke to buy new clothes and too unmotivated to try and lose weight. But a lot more is simply that I've reached a new point of stability with my life; that my acceptance of myself as a woman means that I need fewer and fewer reinforcements via the trappings of femininity. (That, and a year of pounding concrete sidewalks; that gets you out of heels really quick.)

Three years ago, in the middle of my dark winter of discontent when I began to seriously consider the idea of transitioning, I would sometimes ask myself (as a way to not transition) what the difference was between hanging around my apartment in my PJ bottoms and a tee as a man and doing the same as a woman; the idea being that my life would be the same whether or not I transitioned, so why transition? I think I know that answer better now; it's because now I'm free of the doubts about whether I should transition, the doubts about whether or not I really was a woman, the awful amount of psychic energy I dumped into worrying about that problem. And a lot of those issues are gone now, and overall (when I'm not fighting off major depressive crises), I have a lot more energy to think and do things--case in point, this blog, started a year after I transitioned. Even if I have forgotten how to be "a girl," however it was that I construed living inside the public tokens of femininity.

Being a woman--a person--is a lot more satisfying anyway.

The View From My Kitchen Window

Greetings Ducks, from the home office! Which isn't even really an office, but it is in my home. My kitchen, actually: space here in The Great American Metropolis is at a premium, let me tell you!

Lately it has become an actual office of sorts, because of that gig I mentioned last week, which I do from the comfort of home. Well, relative comfort: while I'm no longer unemployed, I am underemployed; I need to do about 50 hours a week at my current rate to make my monthly expenses. I'm not really complaining...well, I am a bit, because this is way below my former rate, alas.

That's the economy, folks.

I do have a view from my window, of sorts--it's on the air shaft between my building and the one next door. Now, this was supposed to be an improvement, way back in the 19th century, over just having buildings cheek-by-jowl; but the reality is that they don't help all that much. The shafts let in almost no light (in the spring, I sometimes get some light in through the shaft in the afternoon) and they have no draw whatsoever, so you don't get much in the way of cross-ventilation. And my view is a brick wall.

Still, it's nice to have an office with a window.

Working from home doesn't particularly bother me--writer, remember?--though it is a drag to be chained to my chair all day long without being able to run out for a while (I'm on a timeclock, and I'd have to punch out if I was up from my keyboard for too long.) It's a bit ironic that I should end up with this gig, though (and not just because my brother used to work for them, something I didn't know until I applied for the job.) Ironic because a lot of trans people end up either wanting a job like this, or having to take a job like this because it's the only job they can safely do.

Trans folks come in all shapes and sizes; and sometimes those shapes, for whatever reason (most often because the person is still in the middle of transition), are harder for cis people to "peg" as one gender or another. This causes enormous discomfort on the part of the cis person (see unboxedqueer's groovy post about this today at Below the Belt), which they immediately pass along to the trans person. Because, that's like the totally fair thing to do, right? I mean, it's the freak's, I mean, your problem, right? Right?

Right.

So a lot of trans people have to look for work that doesn't involve interaction with other poeple. (And yeah, the phone often counts, if you're MtF--phone voice is the hardest voice to manage.) I'm fortunate enough to have a skill that lets' me do this and still survive; many other folks aren't. But it must be their fault, right?

Right.

Back around Halloween a lot of folks like this Onion bit about finding costumes for your effeminate boy. I wasn't one of them, though--to me, the bit ultimately felt pretty cruel and lost the point of laughing at the bigoted announcers in favor of indulging in some cruelty towards the kids. You know, like...holding people up to your own standards of gender presentation? Which never ever hurts anybody, or makes it hard for them to get a job? Yeah. I much preferred this SNL bit instead:

Homocil Commercial - watch more funny videos

Until you come around.

Bonne Année

Greetings, ducks, and Happy New Year. It's been a while, I know. And I'm fine, mostly, now. But I wasn't before.

We don't like to talk about depression much as a culture, although to some degree we've destigmatized it: I mean, here in the Great American Metropolis, everyone jokes about being in therapy or on antidepressants. Jokes are made; sticom plots revolve around a character's mental health; and we wonder if Ziggy had some Prozac if his life would improve and he'd finally buy some pants.

But we don't talk about it, or when we do, when we really sit down and talk about it, all the old stigmas come back. People will whisper about someone being really depressed; there's an uneasiness around the whole subject, a certain trepidation about approaching them, a certain, well, fear: of driving them to suicide? Of catching it yourself? I don't know.

What happened to me is that the chronic low-grade depression I've carried with me since before puberty flared up, as it does sometimes: but first it just gradually began to increase, helped along, no doubt, by my decision to go off antidepressants over the summer. Sure, I got worse, but gradually, gradually, and I couldn't tell how badly I was slipping, until I came back from San Francisco without a steady source of income for the first time in something like six years. And even then, I was doing OK, because I had a line on a job that wasn't ideal but would hold me while I retrenched. And I really thought I was going to get the job. Until I went up and had a horrible series of interviews.

And then I decidedly wasn't OK anymore.

Some of what happened next you no doubt can glean from my BTB post last week: I went to the psych ER, after a series of humiliations I got some meds that my insurance will actually cover, and if I'm not out of the woods, I can at least see the trees thinning out. And tomorrow I start a gig that while not ideal, will at least hold me while I retrench. (And keep working from home.)

But I was going to talk about my depression...and that's just it. It's so hard to talk about: if you don't have it, it's hard to understand. It's nothing like being sad, except when it is; it's nothing like feeling listless, except when it is; it's nothing like feeling hopeless, except when it is--and most of the time you feel at least some of those symptoms all at once. William Styron called it a "brain storm" and that comes close, except in my case there isn't a feeling of storm like violence: just a hopelessness, a feeling that everything I do is futile, that everything is just too hard for me to accomplish and that if I were lucky, I'd just not wake up in the morning. And sometimes, sometimes you just want the pain and hopelessness to go away so badly that you think about making sure you won't wake up in the morning.

I think until you can contemplate the idea of destroying yourself--of making a permanent end to all your problems--and think it a good thing, a sensible thing, to no longer care about the pain you would inflict on others, just so long as your own would go away--until you've hit that point, then no, you don't know what depression really feels like. I've had some sort of suicidal ideation around once a month since I was at least ten years old. And I almost never think seriously about it; when I do, when I get really serious in my own mind, that's when I know to go down to a doctor and do something about it. And I'm lucky: most of the time, there is something to be done, and something I can access to help me. Not everyone is so lucky.

Yet strangely enough, I don't want this post itself to be depressing. Dawn is breaking on my battered mental landscape; my Significant Other of Variable and Often Fabulous Gender spent the weekend with me, and cheered me up. I have a source of income again, and believe it or not, a line on some more interviews.

I'm writing again. And that's a light all of its own.

Adventures in Transition: Inadequacy Edition

Hola, ducks! Did you know that I'm currently between positions? Yes, tis true that I work as a consultant when not writing pithy internet ramblings. But while I was out in California, I lost my main client in a move of wonderful class upon their part. Wev. Anyway, did you know we are in a recession, despite what the economic gurus tell us? I sure do--I'm reminded of it daily as I watch my bank balances dwindle! And also, have I mentioned that I seem to be getting depression for Christmas! And now you are too, if you've read this far?

This is all preamble.

So, okay. I had an interview on Friday. Which didn't go so well...but I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's start again.

So I had an interview on Friday. It was my third interview with these people, but the first one that would be face-to-face; I had survived two phone interviews prior to this, and passed the little "mess around with this database" test they'd sent me with flying colors.

That in itself is an accomplishment of sorts--not the application thing, I do that for a living after all; the phone interview bit. Now, you may not know this, but there's only one kind of transsexual whose voice is helped by transitioning, and I am not that kind of a transsexual! Or to put it more bluntly, estrogen doesn't do anything to your voice. (Testosterone will, so FTMs get a break there, but--as I well know--the effects are permanent.)

So back when I was transitioning--actually, just before I was sure I was going to transition--I began to work with an actress who gave voice lessons on finding a less obviously masculine way for me to talk. Not that I have anything against deep voices in women! Just, um, it was a way to make sure I would get outed. I didn't have a James Earl Jones bass or anything, but my voice pretty clearly marked me as trans.

The best part of the experience was that I was her first trans client, so we sort of assembled our own course in how to do this out of things on the internet, a DVD I had, and whatever seemed to work for us. After a while, we just spent half the class talking to each other, which was a great way to get comfortable using my new voice.

Thus, passing two phone interviews was not a small accomplishment.

Anyway. The face to face interview, which was not only face to face but a state away. And potentially guarded my economic future! After being so confident on the phone interviews, I suddenly found myself...inadequate. Because:

--I needed a new suit, since I'd gained some weight.

--Jeez, skirt or slacks? What was more appropriate?

--It turns out I needed a new suit that was two sizes larger than I normally wear, because I've gained so much weight. Sigh.

--I began to worry: would I come on too aggressive?

--I began to worry: would I not be aggressive enough?

--Or too feminine?

--Or not feminine enough?

--Or for that matter, would they immediately think I was trans?

--Or pull a credit bureau on me and know I was trans (I've been lazy about getting every account I own fixed.)

--Even if they hired me, would they hit me with the "female discount"?

--Do they want a woman in their IT department?

--Was I just the "diversity interview"?

Now, ducks, I know a lot of my female readers are somewhere between bemusement and rage at going over that list. I know it sounds whiny. It is whiny. But let me just say: I knew all this stuff going in, and I decided to transition anyway. I don't have any regrets about that, and I'm not saying I should have any special treatment.

But. This was the first time a lot of these things hit home for me all at once. And it was definitely a different experience for me to think of this stuff before an interview. (Also, I should note that I hadn't been on a serious interview in over six years--advantage to consulting--so there was that factor as well.) And the inadequacy I felt...was pretty massive. There was so much to be afraid of, so many traps I felt like I could blunder into just based on how I looked.

And you, my beloved female ducks, are more than welcome to chorus "Duh!" in my general direction right now. And I deserve it.

Anyway, as far as all that stuff went, I think things went fine--I looked professional, I don't think anyone read me, and I think I struck the right amount of aggression/femininity/whatever. It was the tech questions I whiffed on that probably sunk me! So there you have it.

But at least it was beautiful out in the snow today--the sky a hazy pastel blue at sunset, the air clear and all edges sharp-edged, the snow that light twilit blue you get at sunset. That helps. Even if it won't pay the rent.

Blogging From Home: Anomie Of Unemployment Edition

Okay, unemployed is a strong word for me: I haven't worked a fulltime W-2 job in over 10 years, and I have some contract work that will be coming down the pike soonish, plus a serious line on an actual job. But still: for the first time in a couple of years, I have no place to be to make money right now.

Funny, it actually is like the last time I was out of work around Christmas, four years ago: which incidentally was about two months before the collapse of my marriage.

Anyway, my damn jet lag (and spending too much time reading a Culture novel the last few nights) finally caught up with me and I crashed this morning--fed the Evil Feline Overlords and passed out in bed again. So I didn't get much done today. I was going to walk over to the library to get more Banks novels, but I checked the website and they're all out or on hold.

So I'm going to treat myself to a fabulously cheap calzone for dinner. I thought about ordering a movie from my cable company, but the best I saw was the new Transformers movie. Then I remembered I have "Ginger Snaps" on my DVR, and I also set the same to record "Heathers," a movie I had never seen before. So definitely some blog fodder coming.

Anything is better than watching TNT tonight--they're showing Spielberg's 9/11 porn adaption of "War of the Worlds."

Blog Note

Bad serotonin day. Be back tomorrow.

Allow me to introduce myself...

Greetings, Ducks!

I seem to have taken an inadvertent week off from the blog there--sorry about that. Much of this is because my free time currently is being swallowed by some intense computer programming work; there's a lot to get done, and I'm trying to get it done and over with already, and I've had to teach myself a bunch of things I didn't know how to do before. (Today, I grabbed a static Google maps image and dumped onto my server! Yatta!)

The other truth, though, is that I've been struggling lately with my anti-depression meds. I went off of them over the summer--you may have noticed the intense, burning rage from that period--and went on a completely different med right before I left for Paris. It's an SSRI, a kind of AD that I have a real love-hate relationship with: on the one hand, they seem to work really well for me; on the other, I get all the side-effects. (I now think that my caffeine-withdrawal insomnia the first few days in Paris was heavily exacerbated by the new meds, which have been giving me insomnia of late.) And while the meds definitely kept me from crashing into the slough of despond, I wasn't exactly scaling the heights of ecstasy of late: in fact, my motivation has completely vanished. I haven't done aikido since that night I trained in Paris, I've only posted once in the last week here, and in general I lack any willpower to get things done. (Let's not even talk about my rapidly ballooning weight.)

So I'm going off them again, and maybe I'll find a new psychopharmacologist to get me on something new, or maybe I'll try to find another way to control my mood swings. But I can't keep on going the way I was, with a head lightly wrapped in what felt like fabric softener sheets. And I can't give up my writing, not after I finally began to reclaim it.

This, by the way, is pretty much par for the course with me--I've had a long battle against my depression ever since I finally began to seriously treat it almost a decade and a half ago (there's a fascinating story about how that all came about, which I will save for another day.) The first time I took AD meds, I thought I had locked my depression in a cell deep in my soul and it would never bother me again. The second time, I realized I was locked up in that same cell, but my depression was safely chained up and couldn't get me.

After the third time, I realized that my depression was chained up to me. And if I ever took my eyes off of, that fucker would kill me.

Don't worry, I have an excellent support system and I'm not in any danger right now. And I'm sure I'll get through this and cope--one of the reasons it took me so long to finally start working on my depression is that I'm so damn high-functioning. But it's frustrating to keep ping-ponging around like this.

Also, withdrawal sucks, even with my tapering off regime.

Reruns

One of those days, yesterday, though not as bad as the following will make it seem--just didn't feel much like doing anything, so sorry no post.

Thought I'd rerun this bit...from a long time ago, before The Second Awakening, both the blog and my own personal sense of it. More original stuff later on, I promise.

Ma Saison en Enfer


1. Un nuit en enfer/A night in Hell

The night your wife finally moves out of the apartment, at your request, turns out to be surprisingly shitty. You knew this day would come, probably suddenly, and you've wanted it, but now that it's here you find yourself gripped with a slow-spreading, vastly deepening sense of loss.

You try to keep busy. You've already left work early, giving up billable hours just when you need them the most, to run home to make sure that the things you really want to keep have been clearly separated. As it turns out, you have a surprising number of purses, more than you thought.

You go to your therapy session and remain calm, and then head out to go to a gig at CBGB's gallery with your best friend, who has been your rock through the whole thing. The singer starts launching old songs--"You belong to me" is the one that hits you the worst--and you end up in the bathroom trying to cry. As it turns out, you can sob but there are no tears, not now, not even at the end, not even for you.

2. Mavais Sang/Bad Blood

Maybe it was your fault all along; maybe it was how you were made, all the issues you never confronted. Maybe it was too much in your nature to compromise, to sacrifice. Maybe you thought that somehow, bizarrely, that made you more of who you thought you were, even as the compromises took you further and further away from that idealized, non-existant person.

Maybe it was that never in your life have you felt the need to ravish. Maybe it was that you lay fallow waiting for ravishment.

Maybe that was some taint of the genes. Of the blood, the blood of your father and your funny uncle.

But there came a day when your wife began to take potshots at you for not noticing her, and then your bad blood roared through your tortured veins, poisoning your vision, painting the landscape with loss.

3. Nuit de l'enfer/Hellish Night

There comes a night, as it must, when your wife and alcohol and your medication mix together to perfect a cocktail of hell.

A night when your wife will yell at you, when you will feel everything slipping away from you as she tells you how you are not a man, or not the man she needs, and those words will cut you apart and pare away your illusions of your own happiness.

And the ground of your hell is fertile, and her words take root and bear fruit.

In this night, she will tell you that after the next morning she is no longer sure if you will be together.

Dawn will come without sleep and you will waken to the realization that your marriage is over. You will feel nothing at first. Nothing is left to feel.

Nothing will matter.

4. Délieres/Delerium I

You waken to a wedding, and it saves you. On the dance floor she will beg forgiveness and claim forgetfulness, and you will hold her and feel relieved. You will resolve not to throw away your second chance, because you have stared into the abyss and it nearly ate you.

You will resolve all these things, though you don't mean them. It is not in either of your natures to change course now.

5. Délieres/Delerium II

And for a while you both belive in the lie, because the lie has worked for so long. She will forget that you are not what you seem, not what anybody, even her, wants. And you will forget that she is a flesh and blood woman, not one of your fantasies that you try and shoehorn yourself into, to take the shape of your airy dreams. You will forget her impatience and her impulsiveness and your own propensity for inertia. You will forget all these things in the delerium of the most seductive drug, nostalgia.

You will forget all these things. But you will suspect.

6. L'impossible/The Impossible

She will tell you that she cannot deal with seeing you dressed as a woman anymore, and suggest that she spend the night with her girlfriends outside the city. You will be touched by her sacrifice and seduced by the thought of transgressing, for a while, the narrow boundaries of custom and biology. So you agree, though you grudge it, and hope for a day where the separation won't be necessary.

And yet, and yet, like a canker the suspicion grows that there is more here than you suspect, more being said than you have heard. And yet, and yet, you think that what you suspect, the hair of shadow that now hovers like a flaw in your sight, cannot, must not be true.

Your plans are both disrupted for your birthday. You come home to change, still made up, in your new jeans and pedicured toes, and you sense her anger and hurt. You think it is just that she is home, alone, and confronted even briefly by your own perverted self, and you are sad, you grieve inside yourself for the you that never was and never could be.

You grieve, not knowing yet what you grieve for, not knowing that grief is going to be your lot.

7. L'Eclair/Lightning

When you finally learn the truth, discover the betrayal, it leaves you physically ill. You stumble out of the house on an excuse, and wander downtown. You sit in anger with your best friend and she has nothing to say, nothing to give but an embrace.

Later will come the confrontation, the flash of brilliance that has lit up the dark corners of your marriage, of your soul, and you know as the bolt cleaves the sky so your life has been cloven in two, and you have been put asunder.

And in that flash you see the empty plain of new possibilities, even as your future dies upon the vine and with it all that you were, all that you were trying to be for five years, all that you thought was worth having and sacrificing for. The sacrifice is returned, you look at it as a feast, but your hunger makes you sick and you don't know how to begin, or even if you should.

8. Matin/Morning

You stay up late, far into the morning most days. Sleep is something you find only in the pills you bought at the drugstore. Even strong drink, which you avoid, does not bring it.

You find that you shared so many things. You replace a manicure set and several purses. You agree to give up the chairs in the living room, and her sister's bed that you slept on for two years. You keep the cats but lose the rug and the toothbrush. You lose a bookcase but gain several shelves on your new built-ins, the ones she insisted on.

You find your arms aching for her at night even as your heart shrieks its anger and drowns in its own blood.

The morning after she leaves, this very morning, you come home to the apartment, the empty spaces like fading ghosts. You want to collapse and sleep, but the bed is gone and you are too tired to inflate the air mattress. You take a shower and go to work. You want to cry as you walk to the subway, but you can't, because you are a man and there is no place to go and hide while you weep.

And you know that you will pass almost directly from this morning to another long, empty morning, despite not sleeping since the day before.

9. Adieu/Goodbye

And though she is gone, it cannot, will not be goodbye, though sometimes you scream in your soul to just be left alone, to lick your wounds alone in silence.

You know there will come a day when you can see her again without seeing him in your mind as well. You know there will come a day when you forgive each other for what you did, what you did not do, and all the myriad days that should have come but now will never arrive.

And you know this won't be the end of everything. You know it is the beginning for both of you, and the dammed stream of frustrated posibilities is already pushing you strongly from behind.

But you still want to weep, even though you cannot. You still want your tears, so you can say farewell to them. You still want her with you, and you can never say goodbye to that.

After Arthur Rimbaud
Translations of titles by Bertrand Mathieu

February 23, 2006

Cahiers Parisiens: les Autres, les Etrangres, le Moi

Last night I was having a somewhat dismal (in Paris, that means it was actually decent) meal over on République when I think I saw the mostly iconic image of 21st century Paris I've ever seen: a guy on a rented bicycle, smoking a cigarette as he rode down the boulevards.

Paris, of course, has an uncomfortable relationship with the modern world. It retains it's preeminent place in the world of fashion, is a major political and business center for Europe, and remains the center of gravity of the francophone world. And, of course, it is one of the most beautiful cities in Europe.

But so much of that comes from its curious sense of being frozen in time: the perfection of the nineteenth-century vision of Good City Life, the architecture frozen in place, the parks looking almost identitical to the images on the canvases of the Musée d'Orsay. It's static the way New York, my other favorite city in the world, never is: New York reinvents itself every day, in a furious pace of rebuilding, modifying, reconsidering, reconfiguring. Paris sedately glides by, asleep in the long belle rêve of Haussman.

Sometimes I think only Paris' status as the capital of a major country in Europe keeps it a living city. That, and the changing face of the French world.

I am staying in the Oberkampf district, on the northeastern edge of the city. I'm guessing it's going through a gentrification cycle; it's close to the Marais, the former Jewish ghetto that has become not only the heart of gay and lesbian Paris, but the home of most forward-looking fashion designers. It's an area of former factories being transformed into a residential district.

Out here, not quite in the periphery (let alone the banlieues, the suburbs that ring Paris), I still see more people of color than you do in central Paris, tourist Paris: Africans and Berbers from the old colonies, Indians, Vietnamese, Chinese, Arabs. It makes me homesick and feel at home at the same time, resembling my ethnically mixed neighborhood in the Great American Metropolis. (Also a rapidly gentrifying area with great restaurants.)

I won't rehearse for you the litany of troubles the changing population of France has brought on: the difficulties in assimilating different ethnicities into the French self-conception, the poverty and racism and rioting in the banlieues, the fact that the President of France once threatened retributary violence on those same rioters, before he was elected. France bans the veil at school, championing the cause of secularism and human rights, and we are left with profoundly mixed feelings about exactly what liberties are being abridged, and who has the right to do that. Etre Muslulman en France, screams the headline of one magazine I see advertised: being Muslim in France. What is it like, I, they, wonder, to be marooned in a culture that regards you cautiously, obliged to help you because of the mythic ideals of its own past, but not sure how to come to terms with being more than it was in the past: plural, multiple, different. How it is to be Other until that happens, if it ever does.

I could claim some parcel of this terrain, as both a woman and trans, but I really doubt it's the same: here, as in America, the swath my privilege as a white, able-bodied, educated person cuts through most hindrances.

Still: Tuesday night I went to an aikido class. The dojo has a very different style compared to my dojo back home: much harder, more concerned with proper form than movement. A good experience, but too much like my original aikido dojo for my taste.

I've talked about my French being better on this trip, but the truth is, it's still very weak, comparatively. I can read it passably well (today I was reading the "Declaration of the Rights of Man" in French and getting most of it), but anyone who speaks even moderately fast will have me in the dust. So, when the teacher would explain the technique, I would be...lost. I have almost no vocabulary for body parts: no word for wrist, barely able to recognize "leg" or "knee." I would get a word in every so often, and occasionally a general sense, but for the most part I'd be lost, and have to rely only on what I could see.

Which is the best way to learn, actually. But in those moments...I was the other. I was the one lost in a sea of incomprehension, struggling to use all my wits to figure things out, almost mute, ignorent. (There are times I grow so frustrated with how I speak, because my mind leaps so far out in front of what I actually know how to say: and I know I must sound stupid, with my mangled syntax and wonky accent.) And this is a valuable lesson to learn, to hold to myself the next time I get frustrated with someone else.

We never learn more about our privilege than when we are called on it. Or made to see the other side of it.

Les Cahiers Parisiens de C.L. Minou: un dimanche de feminisme

So yesterday I managed to do a few feminist things while here in Paris--both homages, of a sort.

First, I visited Père-Lachaise, the largest cemetery in Paris and a convenient ten-minute walk from the apartment. I didn't stay long, just long enough to visit the tomb of Heloise and Abelard, the great medieval lovers and philosophers.

After that (and after a quick café au lait--my exchange mate doesn't drink coffee, it seems, and I'm in a caffeine deficiency from trying to make do with tea), I dropped by Violette and Co., a feminist/LGBT bookstore in the arrondissement. I picked up a new copy of Le Deuxième Sexe, volume I--I somehow managed to lose the copy I bought last year--and a book called Je suis pas feministe, mais... ("I'm not a feminist, but..."), mostly because I have a book in English with the same title. They're very different books--the French one is a collection of pointed cartoons, the English one a collection of feminist facts aimed at consciousness raising (i.e., if you believe/know all these things, you really are a feminist.) The cartoons are interesting to me beyond their humor (which I mostly get) because they reproduce spoken French, a very different thing from written French or even the French they teach you at school.

On that note (and of interest to nobody besides myself), I'm doing better with my French than ever--I even attempted to use the subjunctive while talking to the clerk at Violette's. (We also discussed, unbelievably enough, the fact that a) the only translation of The Second Sex into English was, as I said, absolument merde, and b) there's a new one coming, thank goodness.) In any case, it's a relief to me, as one of my quirks is that I actually like to speak French, even if I'm not very good at it.

Today, I'm off to the Louvre--my exchange mate got me a ticket to the premiere of a Titian/Tintoretto show. Tomorrow, I'm going to try aikido Paris-style.

How to Tell You've Transitioned, Part I

How can you tell you've transitioned?

...because shopping for clothes becomes a tedious chore rather than a fun excursion.

OK. Not fair, I get that--I know plenty of women of all stripes and origins who enjoy clothes shopping, including me, on occasion. But still...as compared to the times when I constructed myself as a crossdresser, shopping for clothes doesn't have the same kick.

On the face of it, this seems strange. I mean, I no longer have to use the exasperating and even sometime ridiculous accoutrements to round out my figure, give me the appearance of having breasts, add to my hips so that my skirts wouldn't fall down. I've got a body that actually fits the mold women's clothing is intended for...and that is a relief and a pleasure, often.

On the other hand, maybe my body's part of the issue--I've gained about 25 pounds in the last six months, and while that's not an earth-shattering, cry myself to sleep issue, I am a little unhappy about how I look in my clothes lately.

Which got hammered home yesterday when I went out to buy some clothes for the first time in months (business has been slow and I haven't had the cash to spend on clothes--though maybe I'd kill both my issues there if I stopped ordering out all the time.) But I'm travelling tomorrow and wanted to have some new clothes for the trip, especially some casual dresses, which would be light to pack. I didn't find any that I liked, although I did get some new jeans that will actually fit.

I hate shopping for jeans. There are times I just can't even work up the energy to go try them on, even though I think I look good in a lot of different styles of jeans. But I just hate doing it.

Maybe that's another sign I've transitioned.

My relationship with my clothing has always been...interesting. I'm not like a lot of trans women--I don't deny having had a long period of time identifying as a crossdresser; I think I was a crossdresser, albeit one with a greater interest in transitioning than I let on, even to myself. Back in those days, clothes held an allure, a mystique, an air of the forbidden about them. To crossdress was to engage all my hidden desires and frailities at once; the feeling of being at home while crossdressed was exhilerating and terrifying, and my clothes were fraught with a lot of meaning.

Which isn't to say that clothes aren't fraught with meaning for anyone--compare the different uniforms we wear every day, from bike messenger with one pants leg rolled to corporate honcho in a bespoke suit. Clothes are shorthand for our identities, they send out messages about us--sometimes ones that we don't want to send.

For example, when I was in India, I bought two saris. I bought them because I loved India and the culture and the people, because I wanted to bring home a souvenir, because I think saris are beautiful dresses. I even asked a friend of mine (not Indian) if I could wear one of them to her wedding, and she enthusiastically agreed.

All this was before my "second awakening," though. After I began to engage identity politics further, I saw that my wearing a sari just couldn't be an isolated action--that I couldn't avoid all the centuries of past interactions between Western and Indian people, and that ultimately I wouldn't be able to get past the fact that if I wore a sari, I'd be a cool multiculti chick--whereas an Indian woman who wore a sari in America would seem to be "fresh off the boat," unassimilated, perhaps ingnorant of American culture or even English. And that while some Indian people wouldn't have a problem with me wearing a sari, others would, and it wouldn't be easy to just discount their opinion simply because it was a beautiful dress and I liked it a lot.

I did end up wearing the sari, because my friend insisted, and she was the bride. I was fortunate; the only couple I met at the wedding who were from the region didn't mind at all. Still I changed out of the sari and into a dress after the ceremony. And I'm not upset that I felt I had to do it, and certainly not upset at any Indian people who might take offense at me wearing a sari. I'm upset at the four centuries of Westerners who plundered India, who exoticized it, who used and abused the people there. They're the ones who've "ruined" it for me--not their victims.

So yeah, clothes mean a lot more than just something to keep the wind out.

But you knew that already, didn't you? Any woman who has been verbally (or all too often, physically) assaulted because her neckline or hemline had crossed the invisible threshold between "prude" and "slut," who's been told she's "asking for it" because of what she's wearing, who's been told that her outfit was part of the reason she was attacked (as if women in pants and long sleeves are never raped) knows this. Hell, even I knew that back when I was a crossdresser, although sadly like many of the CDs I knew, I don't think I really fully engaged with all the implications of what that meant. (There are things that being full-time does to you.)

Wearing clothes has a context for me now that it didn't have back when I kept mostly to safe spaces--it has the context any woman has to deal with, from issues of personal safety to the whole construct of female beauty and its impossible-to-attain ideals. So yeah, some of the fun has leached out of it. And that's how I can tell I've transitioned.

Adventures in Transition: Faster, Evil Space Pussycat, Kill, Kill, Kill!

I am a child of the video game era.

Like most white, middle-class kids of my era, we owned an Atari 2600 (the real thing, not the cheesy Sears version.) And while we enjoyed the hell out of the system, we also knew...it sucked.

Plate 1: This was once considered cool!

Like I said, we lived in the golden age of video games, and arcade games--with their superior graphics and gameplay--were all around us. Things weren't helped by how poorly most arcade games were ported over to the 2600--the infamous Pac-Man port is widely credited as causing the North American video game market crash of 1983.

Plate 2: You've heard the legends, but I actually played it--and it was really that horrible.

I didn't care that much for video games.

You probably think that it was because I was some high-falutin' intellectual, with my nose in a book all the time and too much of a nerd to be any good at sports. But that wasn't the reason...well, it wasn't the only reason.

The reason was that I generally stank at them. I have a rather low eye-hand coordination, so most of that generation of video games were full of FAIL for me--I didn't have the reflexes to be any good at them, or rather, I just got too frustrated to actually learn how to play through my difficulties.

So I watched a lot of other people play video games--hell, I just hung out for weeks while a buddy of mine played Ultima IV, which is about as interesting as watching people play D&D...in a language you don't speak.

Once I got to college and had a computer of my very own, however, I got interested in games again. There were actual genres that didn't require me to have the fast-twitch reflexes of a chihuahua who'd drunk too much coffee, and I played those--SimCity, Civilization (I racked up insane hours conquering various planets), baseball games where you only had to "manage," and even less-athletic, more strategic games like Sid Meier's Pirates.

So when I was finally out of college, and got a "real" computer (well, a Packard-Bell--26% new parts!), I made sure to pick up a few games to go with it. One was Doom, which I had played in multi-player mode and enjoyed. (I didn't get too far in that one: have I mentioned my reflexes?) The other was Wing Commander IV. And that one hooked me.

I'd heard about the Wing Commander series for years, but never owned a machine powerful enough to run them--the closest I'd come was playing on a friend's Nintendo once. But the third and fourth versions of the game were really different--they used movies to forward a plot line between missions, and you could actually make choices in how to respond during some of the movie sequences. It was like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Book! (Yes, I am a child of the '80s.)

It certainly didn't hurt that Mark Effin' Hamill played your character.

Plate 3: Hey, isn't that the guy from Star Wars?

While I understand while this kind of video game (usually called Full-Motion Video or FMV) didn't catch on (costs were high, graphics got good enough to do all the stuff inside the game itself), it was extraordinarily compelling for the time--they really managed to come close to the state objective of making it an interactive movie. I ploughed through WCIV in about a month, and for my birthday my girlfriend gave me a boxed set with the first three games. Which I slogged through as well, even though the first two were more standard video games--no movies, but there was an overarching storyline for both. I started playing WCIII, the climax of the series...and stopped.

I was changing computers, I had a girlfriend, I was taking aikido--I had a bunch of reasons. So I never finished the third game, never got past the third mission. And I mostly stopped playing anything resembling shoot-em-ups; I had the occasional game of Civ going on, but for the most part I didn't have any time to play videogames. I did reload Wing Commander I on my machine a few months after my wife and I separated, played it all the way through again, but didn't bother to play the next game.

And then I transitioned.

Now, obviously, video games are a huge minefield of misogynistic crap. (Just check out the ongoing saga of Fat Princess over at Shakesville.) Most games are marketed for men, often in the crudest, most sexist way possible--and then you play the game, and it just gets worse when you see how women are depicted inside the games themselves. Plus so many video games are filled with non-stop, wall-to-wall violence, domination, and macho posturing.

So it makes sense for me to avoid video games, and for the most part I've had no interest--not even in my beloved Civ. Until recently.

Because on a whim I dug out my copy of Wing Commander III, and after wrestling with Windows for a few days, have been flying missions again. And loving it.

This is full of irony for me. First, aren't I the person railing on about kyriarchy and how we need a culture freed from the evils of domination? Aren't I generally opposed to violence of almost any kind? And don't I love cats? Hell, don't people call me Cat?

So why in the hell am I zipping around space blowing up evil space cats and following a plotline that ultimately ends with a shocking act of genocide?

Plate 4: I'm sure with a big enough lap to cuddle up in, he'd stop trying to DESTROY ALL HUMANS.

I have no idea. I'm sucked in, again, by the storyline, and the gameplay remains challenging but not impossible even for a slow-fingered person like myself. There are even female characters in the game, and they're not decoration--two are highly competent fighter pilots, and one is the ship's chief mechanic. (Of course, one set of choices leads you to have a relationship with one of them, which is a bit squicky, but on the other hand it is remarkable to have a video game that was a combat sim even mention the word love.)

I've noticed a few things different this time around. I'm not any better or worse a pilot than I used to be--I always played the game the way I thought my character really would fly, so I don't try to run up my score if the mission can be finished otherwise. My adrenaline reactions are...different nowadays, though. After a long session at the game, I can get a bit twitchy, and somewhat spatially disoriented, like I keep expecting the constant motion the 3D sim provides. I don't recall that stuff happening the first time around, and I wonder how much my current endocrinology has to do with that.

Of course, playing a video game--playing a violent, combat-oriented video game--brings up all sorts of gender crap for me. (But then, getting the paper in the morning has the potential to do that.) Mostly it's societal stuff that I, of all people, should know better than to listen too--women aren't violent, women don't play video games, women should sit down and watch the damn Lifetime Movie Network and keep careful notes of the cleaning products they must buy next trip to the store. Like I said, mostly crap.

But on the other hand, I haven't talked much about this with other women I know. Maybe because I fear that the women who know about my history will view this as one more way I'm not like them--and the women who don't know about my history might get ideas.

Silly. But there you have it.

In any case, I'm close to the end, and I'll drop The Big Bomb on Kilrah and win the game pretty soon now. Maybe with more qualms than the designers might have expected their players to have--they may be evil space kitties, but that doesn't make me happy to blow up their home planet, for goodness sake. And then maybe I'll head over to Women Gamers; I'll be needing a new fix soon.

How To Be Alone

Greetings again, ducks.

One of the hardest things I've set myself out to do is to write something every day, mostly here. Not all that easy; occasionally even Motormouth Me runs out of things to say. So I struggle with it, usually right at the point when a bunch of readers have dropped by in response to some blogvertising I've done.

Way to keep up the momentum, C.L.

I've been busy with work stuff the last few days and not getting enough sleep. Which explains part of why I've been away.

Would that it was the only reason.

I've been struggling a bit lately with the consequences of my late-aborning political awakening. (You knew there would be consequences, didn't you?) Specifically, I no longer seem to be able to keep from alienating people, including people who are dear to me.

I'm not sure what to do about it, either.

The essence of my--enlightenment, let's call it--has been that I have become acutely, painfully aware of my own privilege. This has led me to radically reexamine the world around me and the ways that privilege, mine and others, interact to create this beaten up planet and downtrodden human race.

And I don't know how to keep quiet about it. I don't know how to stop seeing, how to stop talking (and let's face it, preaching) about what I see.

I don't know, in short, how to just shut up and let things roll over me without it seeming like collusion. That's in part what I was trying to say in my previous post: that I can't even watch a muddle-headed B-movie like Uncommon Valor without seeing all the hypocrisies and unspoken assumptions it contains.

And I'm not sure that I even want to stop.

Part of the reason I started the blog is that I wanted to find an outlet for what I was feeling (especially the trans-related stuff) that I could use to keep it from leaking into my everyday life. In that regard, The Second Awakening is an utter failure, because writing about this stuff, digging deeply into my own thought processes, learning about the things going on around me, has only radicalized me even more. (Plus, I've become just proud enough of what I'm doing to want to talk about it, which knocks not outing myself as trans into a cocked hat.)

I don't think of the blog as a failure, of course; I like writing it, I like how I've had to confront a lot of my own internalized issues in the course of writing it, I like how I've managed to start to come to some conclusions about the world based on the work I've done here--work that feels so important to me; maybe the most important work I've ever done.

All the same, I wonder about where I am going, where this is taking me. Most of all, I worry that I will go some place that many people who are important to me cannot follow. That as a result of what I am doing, I will end up alone.

Maybe that's the price to pay. Lord knows I'm used to that kind of thing--transness has always been the gift that keeps on taking.

But I was kind of hoping that I was finally coming home, instead of walking further out into the cold.

How To Lose Your Sense Of Humor

Greetings, Ducks! So I had a super bad day yesterday--one of my depressive episodes, just didn't want to do anything--which explains why there wasn't a post. (Also: why I still haven't touched some work for one of my clients, yikes.) I slept late and blew off most of my responsibilities besides feeding the cats, and watched some TV.

One of the things I watched was an old movie--I shudder to think how old, because I remember when it came out: Uncommon Valor. In case you never heard the name before, it was a Reagan-era film about a mission to rescue POWs still being held by the Vietnamese.

As a movie, it's not bad: it has a decent cast (Gene Hackman, Fred Ward, a pre-Dirty Dancing Patrick Swayze among others) and gives the idea an above-average treatment. I won't comment too much on the circumstances of the era the movie was made--Reagan-era macho posturing, the very real question about whether there were any POWs still in Indochina, and the overall wish-fulfillment the whole back-to-Vietnam genre invoked.

What was interesting to me, watching the movie for the first time in, hmm, over 20 years, was my reaction to it now as opposed to how I might have viewed the movie at different points in my life.

I first saw Uncommon Valor when I was in a, a, um, Scouting organization. Okay? Nuff said. So it was a decidedly masculine environment, we were all kids--I was 11, there were some teenagers--and we probably grooved off the well-done action sequences. (And the foul language--it was an R-rated film.) The film became a favorite of mine, and my brother and I borrowed it several times from the local library.

Since then, many things have changed, of course: I've grown up, I've changed genders, I've lost a lot of my taste for war movies. But maybe most important of all, I've become politically awakened. And that has radically changed how I see--everything.

Now, I know I'm caught up in the first flush of all this activism, that there's nothing so zealous as a new convert, and that I could be a bit of a prig under the best of circumstances. But at the same time, having begun to look at the world in terms of dominance and oppression, privilege and denial--well, it's like eating one potato chip: you just can't stop yourself.

So, watching Uncommon Valor brought up a lot of thoughts that frankly might not have occurred to me even after I transitioned, but do occur to me now, such as (spoilers follow):

Is it really true that men have to fight each other to resolve their issues? Early on in the film, Patrick Swayze--a skilled soldier with no combat experience--ends up fighting Randall "Tex" Cobb, the toughest of the Vietnam vets on the team. The vets resent Swayze for treating them like recruits while he trains them; he feels he has to prove to them he won't fail in combat. So they fight, as custom, law, and generic Hollywood screenwriting all demand.

But seriously? Is that the only way he could have proved himself to them? Why do we just assume so? Why do men think that's so? Isn't that a poisonous thing to indoctrinate our children with? Aren't there alternatives?

Wait a minute, you're the good guys?: When Hackman's outfit arrives in Thailand to pick up their weapons, they are seized by the CIA and the Thai police. Hackman, obsessed with rescuing his son (whom he believes is held in the prison camp that is their target) decides to continue on anyway, buying weapons in the Golden Triangle. He sends out some of his men to get a vehicle, instructing them to "Steal it!"

So they come back with a truck that is clearly owned by a Thai--it's decorated with Buddha imagery. And clearly not a rich Thai, because the back of the truck is covered with plastic, not the tarpulin it comes with. So WTF? They just stole some local poor guy's livlihood? Presumably, somebody used that truck to feed their family, earn a living, escape from poverty. Yet we're supposed to overlook this, because our "heros" are on a noble mission...that will involve killing some more poor people. Nice.

Speaking of the locals: Depsite spending the last half of the movie in Thailand and Indochina, the only people of color our heros have any interaction with is a porter/guide, Mr. Chang, and his two daughters. Purpose: to die (two of them are killed in the mission), and serve as a sex interest for one of the white characters. No other people of color have any major interactions with the main characters except to get shot or provide a service--even the arms dealer they meet in the Golden Triangle is French. (And a poorly-done stereotype he is as well.)

And speaking of people of color, who are we rescuing?: In the end, the mission succeeds, and four American POWs are rescued. All of whom are white.

Say what?

It's not exactly a secret that the Vietnam War was proportionally worse on African-American than on white soldiers:

African Americans often did supply a disproportionate number of combat troops, a high percentage of whom had voluntarily enlisted. Although they made up less than 10 percent of American men in arms and about 13 percent of the U.S. population between 1961 and 1966, they accounted for almost 20 percent of all combat-related deaths in Vietnam during that period. In 1965 alone African Americans represented almost one-fourth of the Army's killed in action. In 1968 African Americans, who made up roughly 12 percent of Army and Marine total strengths, frequently contributed half the men in front-line combat units, especially in rifle squads and fire teams. Under heavy criticism, Army and Marine commanders worked to lessen black casualties after 1966, and by the end of the conflict, African American combat deaths amounted to approximately 12 percent—more in line with national population figures. Final casualty estimates do not support the assertion that African Americans suffered disproportionate losses in Vietnam, but this in no way diminishes the fact that they bore a heavy share of the fighting burden, especially early in the conflict.

So the odds are that at least one of those POWs should have been black, unless there was some Vietcong/NVA policy to not capture black soldiers. (There may have been, perhaps motivated by both Vietnamese and American racism--white prisoners would have been more valuable, sigh.) But somehow I don't think a movie to go in and rescue black, Latino, or even Asian-descended POWs would have sold as well, especially not in Reagan-era America. Instead, a bunch of white guys (plus one African-American, who to give the film its due, is a highly decorated helicopter pilot and an officer) recuse some other white guys, and kill a bunch of brown people along the way.

This isn't to come down too hard on Uncommon Valor, which is what it is and is very much a movie of its times. Rather, I wanted to show you what my thought processes look like now--how becoming more engaged keeps me from just letting things slide; how learning about my own privilege makes it difficult for me to just ignore it and go with the flow.

Maybe this has made me "humorless" or "shrill" or "a pain in the ass." Actually, it probably has. And that makes me sad; I don't want to be those things, I don't want to alienate people or always be harping about things.

But we live in a violence soaked world, filled with oppressions and petty tyrannies, and they drive me to distraction. How can I not be outraged? How can I not feel sympathy with the downtrodden? How can I not acknowledge how I am complicit with these horrors?

I don't know. But it seems to have cost me my sense of humor. If that's what it was.