cigfran

look... drawing ever-finer and more tortured distinctions between all those blurry little lines that make up the domain of experience is not the way to get on in the world, ok?

"cisgender transsexual?" give me a fucking break. sounds to me as if, in an effort to stake out our own little specialness, we've just wound up back with the essentialists again.

what the hell am i supposed to do, walk around with a little gender manifesto to hand over to everyone just so they can address me? wear a special bracelet on my wrist with all the appropriate acronyms, pronouns and categories etched on it? festoon myself with color-coded handkerchiefs?

for fuck's sake.

i traveled through the uncanny valley and was mistaken for a simulacrum.

i think i ought to do some writing.

kazooie - our smaller, scruffier chinchilla - has been feeling poorly, as evidenced by his production of piles of soft poo rather than his normal output of black rice-like turdpellets.

so we took him to vet where we discovered, not only that he probably had a gut bug, but that he is alarmingly underweight... to remedy which, we were given a special diet - a sort of Chinchilla MegaMass10000 Weight Gain Power Shake - to be administered at least twice a day.

the procedure involves mixing a scoop of dried, powdered grasses, herbs and fruits with warm water, drawing 5ml of it into a large-bore syringe, then propping the syringe on the side of the cage and gently applying continuous pressure while he locks his little jaws around the end and soaks up his mash.

so we are essentially injecting his food right into his face.

oh he loves this. yes he does.

I'll never understand how someone with my considerable critical faculties can also be so credulous.

drink caesar salad dressing straight from the bottle.

put hot sauce on my toast.

sprinkle flavored pepper into my palm and lick it up like a deer.

i've bought a lap steel guitar.

i've never been comfortable with conventional guitar technique, but have always been fascinated by this instrument and i think i can better manage its physical quirks. i'm listening to lots of dobro and hawaiian music (the latter is especially good for work) and am beginning to pick up a bit on the idiosyncratic culture... much of which involves the unbelievably wide variety of tunings. dealing with the tunings, and how they affect chording, is going to have the side effect of finally forcing me to "get" music theory, which i've avoided pretty thoroughly until now.

i even have a possible line on a nice pedal steel. as if i didn't already have enough oddball things to keep busy with.

mercurial? moi?

watching the news, the remote camera pans across a crowd of protesters and police, the latter garbed in fluorescent green vests. the data flow breaks for a moment and the remaining digital still image begins to degrade, pixelating and shifting until all the bright green fragments lose their firm boundaries against the browns and greys of the people and the city, and the last instant before the flow picks up again looks like it was painted by monet.

have i told you yet to fuck off and die?
no?

oh. maybe i was just talking to myself.

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=el4eUKmLujg

I really do believe that death – or more properly, our awareness of it – is the engine of art. It is the soul of the creative act, which is our only real hope for something like immortality, and also the truest expression of its impossibility.

Siva was my first god.

getting really damned sick and tired of being triggered.

Link: http://cigfran.net/index.php/skylark/2009/03/22/brief-comments-on-trans-cultural-appropr

an evangelist is someone persuaded that their own metaphor is not only powerful but true.

certain basic frustrations have never been resolved, and in fact have just sort of settled into a kind of sediment that lends a certain musty grit to my attitudes about the trans universe.

in a comment to an excerpt on Lisa's blog from a typically strong-minded entry by Little Light, someone said that "we have to look after our own."

to which i replied:

except that, by and large, we don’t. we faction, and dismiss wisdom, and walk away. we have no handsign and no mentors. we eat our own.

which is pretty much exactly what i said about two and a half years ago.

i could go on about it, but i don't feel particularly inclined. i don't need to enumerate the ways in which we suck, or wax theoretic about why. it's been done to death by people with no more stake in it than i have now, but with a sustained sense of mission.

gwen smith has argued that we are not a community. i think this is not true... but i think that we're a kind of bizarro community, where what would be a bond and a sharing between anyone else are for us just more lances, fences and pits. we are a community of shame, of pain and fear and anger. and being humans, not angels, those are the dominant features of our tribe.

it's been a letdown, i tell you.

i am not going to make it through the next three months without effective anti-anxiety medication.

Stagflation:

the ever-rising costs of holding a bachelor party.

the problem with any ideological echo chamber is that it tends to drown out any but its own interests, and makes every experience about itself.

a fanatic is someone who sees everything through the same lens.

you know, there are times when i wish people would turn off the Leftist Critique engine and just dig the fucking esthetic. not everything of merit is pure. in fact, my experience is that a lot of great art has some pretty damned rough edges.

a few paragraphs of glib, politically correct snarkitude is a poor substitute for actually paying attention to ideas and practice.