So, I went to the U2 concert in Tampa with my cousin, through a series of events that involved her breaking up with a boyfriend and me leaving two teenage kids alone (it went better than you might expect). My mom and stepdad wanted us to make a little vacationlet of it, and graciously paid for a couple of nights at The Birchwood in St. Petersburg.

It was a lovely hotel, the decor and service absolutely amazing. There were chocolates and fancy bottled water and a clawfoot tub that proved to be very nice for soaking in.

My cousin and I marveled at it and thought we'd never stayed anywhere as nice. I remembered later that the hotel Dave and I stayed in for our honeymoon was arguably just as nice, especially with a view that overlooked the beach. But that was back in January of 1998, just shy of twenty years ago, and it might as well have been another lifetime.

But that was kind of the theme of the vacation. My cousin and I hadn't spent any extended time together since we both were teenagers. And The Joshua Tree tour is the thirtieth anniversary of the release of the album.

***

The thing about the Joshua Tree album is that, as I recall, it wasn't even mine. My stepmom bought the CD. But I played the hell out of it, particularly cranked up on my parents' stereo at full volume when they weren't home.

There is a certain feeling that I associate when the guitar kicks in, with its haunting echoes, and it reminds me of what one friend calls Sehnsucht and another friend and I call (for reasons that have been lost in the mists of time) "sun dog", loosely after the atmospheric phenomenon, but for us it means a very wistful state of longing.

I didn't listen to the album before the concert at home or in my car, and it wasn't until I was in the car with my cousin headed to St. Pete that I heard it recently, though then it was mostly in the background while we chatted. We did belt out "Red Hill Mining Town," a favorite of both of ours.

I felt a little bit like a poser. While I'd loved the album, I hadn't listened to U2 in years. My last album in heavy rotation was Achtung Baby, which was the soundtrack for part of my college years. I felt like I'd lucked into getting to go through a series of events but that maybe I wasn't enough of a real fan. Still, the moment the concert started, I was mesmerized. Despite not having heard the album in probably close to the thirty years since it came out, I was able to sing along to every word.

There was something odd about it, like inhabiting my big, ungainly 45-year-old body with glasses and brown hair streaked with gray...at the same time as I was inhabiting, or imagining, my 15-year-old thin body with its contacts and makeup and long permed hair.

I wanted to do justice to that 15-year-old young woman, wanted to bring her forward in time to hear with me. I wished that she had been able to hear the concert back when the album came out. I wished so much for her, this being both me and not-me, the same age as my daughter. I sang my voice out for her, and I danced for her, and I closed my eyes and savored each note, each one of Bono's words, each guitar solo from The Edge, for her.

***

The next day my cousin and I took a trip to the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Pete. It was within walking distance of our hotel. Walking in the hot Florida sun - though there was a breeze - made me a little cranky, but the view of the marina and the bay was pretty.

I hadn't been to the Dalí Museum since I was in my twenties, and it was actually in a different location in St. Pete back then. I can't remember if Dave and I were married yet or still in college when we went there. I just remember being on a tour with the docent and having them say, step forward and you'll see this, step backward and you'll see that, and doing so and being mesmerized by the genius that is Dalí at his best. Before, the only thing I'd known about Salvador Dalí was that he was a Surrealist and had a funny mustache. But being at the museum made a whole world open up for me, and one of the best parts what that Dave was there with me and seeing all the same things too, feeling that same sense of wonder.

I was really hoping to expose my cousin to that, to see her face light up with that same feeling, but it wasn't the same. The docent we ended up with was more interested in telling us about all the places in Spain he'd visited than analyzing the paintings...either that, or we bailed before he quite got to that part. My cousin and I explored on our own. She liked his early, more impressionistic pieces...but she found the breasts and penises hidden and not-so-hidden in the larger body of his work pornographic and agitating.

And I realized - even as the twenty-something part of me was disappointed - that my cousin gets to have her own experience and perspective. That part of going to something like the Dalí museum is what it does to and for the individual, that people get to have their individual experiences of that.

We did both enjoy the food in the cafe, the view and the architecture from the building, and the garden with the Spanish guitar music playing.

***

My mom's family was very close, and my maternal grandparents were an integral part of my life growing up. I spent most of the time I wasn't with my parents with my grandparents, and so did my cousin. We practically grew up together; we were like sisters. I remember playing with her Barbie dreamhouse, swimming in my grandparents' above-ground pool, watching all the same reruns together after school, fighting with her over practically everything: including the way she would follow me around everywhere and try to boss me around, even though she was three years younger than me.

And then my parents got divorced when I was eight, and I became more like a visitor to my grandparents' house than an inhabitor of that world. It was still home...but not quite. I was feted and treated like the prodigal daughter when I went over there on my mom's weekends, because they weren't seeing me everyday anymore. All my favorite foods were served, chicken and green beans and macaroni and cheese. Lemon cake. My grandmother fussed over me and tried to fatten me up, because at the time I was painfully thin, all bones and arms and legs.

My grandparents were just so excited to see me.

And then when my cousin's parents got divorced when she was twelve, my cousin ended up living with my grandparents. She inhabited that world that I just visited, her home my home-but-not-quite-home. But we were still close as teenagers, still almost like sisters, and we talked a lot about boys and clothes and school.

Being together over these past couple of days, now in 2017, we laughed so hard that we cried, and in some ways it was like being that close again. And yet there were reminders, for me, of how the world I live in is much different. I like to think that despite being in a heterosexual marriage, my life isn't heteronormative. I don't identify as Christian anymore, and she's a Baptist. There are similarities in terms of how we raise our kids, but there are vast differences too. And we're on completely different sides of the political spectrum. I would be shocked to find out that she didn't vote for Trump. She fat-shames herself and doesn't seem to realize that I'm almost a hundred pounds heavier than she is. (Yes, really.)

There are things that my cousin knows about me that no one else knows quite so well. Even though I can describe it here, you won't quite get the way I could climb a guava tree to the very tiptop when I was eight, or my very intense longing to be able to inhabit the world of Battle of the Planets and be another member of G-Force, even if it was only in my mind. My cousin knows those means of escape from the dance that both sets of our parents did, that our grandparents did. Both of us can recite most of my grandmother's chronic illnesses and the drama that went with them, some of which I share (and some of which I'm just finding out about now.) Our childhood and adolescence is hopelessly intertwined.

But there are also so many things I can't share with her anymore: a love of Jesus, a love of new clothes; being thin, being excited over boys. I love my cousin deeply, but it's a love grounded in the past more than the present, and there are sides of myself that I don't know how to present to her now. Being around her is a little bit like squeezing into the too-tight clothes you used to wear everyday but haven't quite fit into in a while.

***

Last night my cousin and I had dinner together and we ordered alcohol with dinner and went to the rooftop bar after dinner and drank more alcohol and laughed until we cried.

For me, it was coming close to exceeding my limits with alcohol but being responsible enough not to, something I couldn't quite figure out in my teens and twenties. For her, it was the first time she'd ever been drunk. She said, "Wow! Now I know why people do this!" while I kept giggling.

She was responsible enough to know when to stop, and I plied her with advil and water to try to prevent a hangover, and we woke up in the middle of the night and started reliving all our experiences and laughed so hard again I couldn't catch my breath.

***

The past couple of days have been a combination of returning to my younger selves, seeing life both through my eyes and their eyes, and getting dizzy from the combined juxtaposition. (Or maybe just from the alcohol last night.)

***

I don't know quite how to end this. But here's a quote from a short story I read a long time ago, "Eleven" by Sandra Cisneros.

What they don’t understand about birthdays and what they never tell you is that when you’re eleven, you’re also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and one. And when you wake up on your eleventh birthday you expect to feel eleven, but you don’t. You open your eyes and everything’s just like yesterday, only it’s today. And you don’t feel eleven at all. You feel like you’re still ten. And you are—underneath the year that makes you eleven.

Like some days you might say something stupid, and that’s the part of you that’s still ten. Or maybe some days you might need to sit on your mama’s lap because you’re scared, and that’s the part of you that’s five. And maybe one day when you’re all grown up maybe you will need to cry like if you’re three, and that’s okay. That’s what I tell Mama when she’s sad and needs to cry. Maybe she’s feeling three.

Because the way you grow old is kind of like an onion or like the rings inside a tree trunk or like my little wooden dolls that fit one inside the other, each year inside the next one. That’s how being eleven years old is.

You don’t feel eleven. Not right away. It takes a few days, weeks even, sometimes even months before you say Eleven when they ask you. And you don’t feel smart eleven, not until you’re almost twelve. That’s the way it is.

***

I'm forty-five. And I'm also eight, and fifteen, and eighteen, and twenty-something, and all the ages that make up the entire span of my life.

That's the way it is. And that's okay.

So I'm going to try to write in this journal every day, mostly to get into the habit of writing and to practice a little bit. I can't promise that any of it will be remotely interesting.

Today I want to write a little bit about my mental health issues.

I have an anxiety disorder. I'm offically diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder, but I also get bouts of panic and panic attacks.

I also have depression. Without medicine, I become very despondent and suicidal. With medicine, it's managed, but I still have bouts of low energy and just general meh-ness. I still struggle with thoughts of not being enough or doing enough.

This (the low energy) has been going on recently. My husband had ankle surgery about a month ago, so I've been taking care of him in addition to doing household chores (haphazardly and honestly terribly) and taking my kids various places and working, when I have work. (I work part-time, doing a contract copyediting sort of work.) When I'm not doing any of those things, all I've been doing is sleeping.

But I think I'm coming out of that a bit. I've been wanting to write in here, which is a good step. I've been a bit more active in terms of getting things done around the house. I'm trying to be gently encouraging to myself.

I've been going to therapy once a week. My therapist and I started moving to seeing each other every other week, but the stress of the current situation has made me bump it back up to weekly.

Right now I have a work meeting coming up in a few minutes, and it's triggering my anxiety. My general symptom is to get really nauseated. Sometimes I actually throw up. So I'm sitting here, trying to calm myself and not to be sick, and so that's what I'm writing about now.

Sometimes I take 1/2 a xanax, but xanax always makes me sleepy.

The death of Amy Bleuel was upsetting, even though I didn't know her personally. It's hard for me to have faith in overcoming these mental health issues when public figures who are also battling depression just can't fight it anymore. But I find myself wanting to get a semicolon tattoo...in spite of it? Because of it? Either way, I feel like I can't give up; I have to keep fighting. I like the idea of having something visceral to remind me of that.

Work meeting is late starting and my nausea has mostly abated. For some reason, work-related things are often triggery.

If you have mental health issues and want to share some of your experiences, please feel free to comment below. I'm keeping this public for now, though, because I'm working to be more open about it and not be afraid of the stigma (which is very real).

Plainsight

People fear what they can see:
the swollen figure-eight
spinning shimmering thread
with spiny legs;
the sly, slithering predator
whose fangs stop hearts;

And this relic, her teeth grinning,
busy basking on stubby legs,
her rugged skin camouflaged
atop a glistening log.

She hears the faint dip
of an oar in water and slides in
one great liquid movement
under the river, invisible.

The sun feels like love,
radiant on her bumpy back.
And when she's hungry
she’ll chomp fish, birds, turtles –
perhaps the occasional puppy –
but not humans. (Not usually.)

The real fears
(vanishing neurotransmitters, vagabond cells, viruses)
are hard to wrap our teeth around.
Their symbols lack a sinuous grip.
Merciless,
they’ll drag us under tightly
where we’d otherwise
never dare to go.

While the alligator
huddles atop her makeshift raft
measuring the tremors
of each tiny ripple:
each moment she floats,
she falls in love again
with an incandescent sky.

My word for 2013 is connection.

I'm thinking of connections with others (hi) as well as connections across spiritual paths and connections among my various selves.

More mundane resolutions are to take my vitamins, drink more water, and give my brain/imagination Interesting Stuff (to do or to consume).

Today I have been cranky and feeling feelings that I don't like feeling, like anger and jealousy, ugh. It has to do with friendships - one friend is kind of rallying around another, which is good, and the friend who's being rallied around is in crisis, so it's good for her to have help.

Here's where the jealousy comes in: I feel like I'm overwhelmed all the time, but I have to hold it together and be strong. So it's just this feeling of knowing that no one's gonna rescue or help me, and kind of equating that with not being loved or whatever. It's all bullshit, but it's where I am kinda. I get in this place of, "Yeah, fuck everyone; no one cares," and I don't like it, and I don't think it's really me, or true, even, but at the same time it's somehow honest right at this very second.

I don't want to dwell on it, but I'm also working on being honest with my feelings. Not in a venting them all over the place sort of way, but I don't want to be smiling over festering resentment either.

That said, Dave and I are in a good place, and I was able to talk with him about it all, and he got where I was coming from. That's really good. And I went out with Daniel, looking for some stuff to make this herbal balm he's working on, and it was good getting out with him, laughing and spending time together.

I love my family, I do. I just think it would also be good to have other perspectives and just friends in my life. And I do - in some ways, this is me not being grateful or quite able to see it. In other ways, it's that between working and parenting and trying to take care of the house, there's just not a lot of time left for maintaining any friendships, online or offline.

Okay, done whining now. I think. :-)

So, I did it! Did something, anyway. I'm posting this with Ubuntu as my operating system (though technically Linux is my OS and Ubuntu is my distro, though, I think?). I ended up making recovery discs first, but then I didn't partition anything. I just restarted everything from the beginning with Ubuntu.

So far it's much easier than the last time I tried to use Linux, though figuring out how to get it to read the network printer may end up being a bit of a challenge.

Yay for trying new things!

A transgender woman and senior citizen starts a "charm school" for LGBT youth: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/ct-met-trice-charm-school-0416-20120416,0,3446855.story

(WARNING: Might be triggery if adherence to gender norms and the idea of passing (or not) make you twitchy.)

I have such mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, she's a mama for younger people who don't really seem to have one, and I think that's beautiful. On the other, statements like "ladies wear a slip" make my skin crawl. (Even though that was technically said by her great-aunt, it's implied that she agrees.)

On the third hand, I really hate the trend in children's/teen's clothing that has things getting skimpier and skimpier. I want my nine-year-old to look nine, not twenty-five and on her way to a nightclub.

On the fourth hand, I really think that everyone gets to present the way they want. Period.

On the fifth hand, I may feel differently about the fourth hand when my own children are older.

I think I'm hijacking my own thread at this point.

To get back to the point, I'm curious about what other (trans-friendly, of course) folks think of this charm school.

eta: eumelia brings up a really good point, and that's that passing can be a safety issue. Everyone I know who's transitioned seems so safe and happy that I forget it's an issue, but it is.

My daughter is sticking pins into my little pincushion face and yelling, "Fatality to the $body part!" Before that, it was piercings but quickly got more brutal. I'm not sure if I should be concerned or not.

We ended up looking at extreme body modifications (the clothed kind). Ellie doesn't want to get any piercings. I told her it's fine either way - she can grow up to get a lot of them or get none at all.

I only have ears. I did have my ears double-pierced, but I'm sure those holes closed up a long time ago. Looking at pictures, I think about getting my nose pierced, but I don't think I really want to.

Ellie said the pincushion would be a boy, and when I figured out she was doing hair, I said that women could have really short hair, so then I showed her pictures of bald women. I didn't realize until later what I could have oh my god gotten in the image search, but luckily all the images were of those bald in the traditional sense.

This is one of those times where I don't know if I'm a good parent or a bad one or just lazy. "Hey, let's look at weird pictures on the Internet and give you ideas for accessorizing my pincushion!"

Work was okay today, except we had one of those meetings where I feel like I'm hopelessly lost because our approach keeps changing, and sometimes I just don't feel in the loop.

But tonight there is sewing, Internet, and pictures. Sometimes that's enough.

From Downloads

shaterri pointed me to this article and I have to say I have mixed feelings about it, as well as Coming Out Day in general. (Coming out as what? To whom? And why?)

It bothers me that my orientation is supposed to define me.

At the same time, I really hate it that people - people I love - are discriminated against because they've chosen to marry people of the same sex. I hate it that their marriages - which should be exactly as valid as mine is - are usually not legally recognized at all. I really, really hate it that other people, some of whom are also my friends, are or have been discriminated against - that this group is often killed in hate crimes and/or bullied violently because no one wants to believe that their gender can exist independently of their...what is it, even? Chromosomes? Genitalia? I don't even know.

So I care about all this passionately. Personally.

At the same time, when I read this article, I feel as if there is a party with four rooms. In one room, people are talking about trucks and boats over poker and beer while Van Halen is playing. In another, they're dancing to club music and stealing glances at men who are drop dead gorgeous. In another, they're writing poetry, listening to Ani diFranco, and talking about the last episode of the L Word.* In the fourth room, they're reapplying lip gloss, listening to country music, and swapping recipes or gushing over the latest Nicholas Sparks novel-movie-whatever.

And I'm in the hallway, or the bathroom, hiding because I feel like I just don't fit in anywhere. Or maybe I'm frantically going from room to room putting on or taking off makeup. It's probably hardest for me to pass in the male rooms, though y'know, I really like beer and Van Halen, dancing and cute femmy boys, and most certainly Ella Fitzgerald.

Still...I also adore the Indigo Girls (Amy is my favorite), the movie Harold and Maude, and cuddling. On the other hand, I love baking, and I don't even want to tell y'all how many times I've watched When Harry Met Sally. I think everyone reading this must know how I feel about children.

People are complex, and I don't know if OKCupid profiles are the best thing to go on when evaluating who we are. Maybe OKCupid profiles are more about who we think other people - important people! - want us to be. Despite all that, I know I'm likely blurring the intent of the article, which was to say, "Hey, there's really nothing to be afraid of here, unless it's soy milk." ;-)

But here's my not-so-secret wish: I want to go to the party where you don't have to distinguish the girls from the boys, where music of all different kinds is played, and where you have to actually be getting naked with someone before you know if the parts underneath the clothes are all that important anyway. Hopefully - if things have progressed nicely - it won't much matter.

But that's not this world we live in right now.

I know that.

I just don't have to like it all that much.

***

*Okay, who am I kidding here? I would totally be in the lesbian room until I got outed for liking people with penises.

me: I am behind in my pbem and having a hard time getting motivated. I need to level up and I'm not sure where to put my stats.
Sent at 7:09 PM on Monday

me: My god, I think I've leveled up at being a geek.