For a while now, I’ve secretly wished not to have any emotions at all. (It was a very secret wish: even I was not informed.) I want to run around doing exciting things, but I want to dispassionately observe them at a distance. I want to watch myself on the telly. I want to be a perpetual tourist in my own life. I want an off switch on my emotion chip like the silly Star Trek android, Data.
On the other hand, I’ve been feeling more or less depressed recently, which I hadn’t felt for a quite a while . . . and I have had virtually no anxiety. Are my choices anxiety or mild depression? It’s much nicer to be sad for no reason than to be panicked for no reason.
I don’t have data, but I suspect that it’s very difficult to write music while striving to not feel anything. Which may also explain why it’s been so hard.
Why try not to feel? Well, it often kind of sucks. A few years ago, when I used to sometimes get depressed or stressed or whatever, I had a feeling like I was at the bottom of a long shaft, like a smokestack of an abandoned factory. And on my shoulders, there was a flat, large board that fit perfectly inside the shaft, like the floor of an elevator car. I was holding it on my shoulders to keep from getting crushed while more and more things got dropped on to it. But this image is no longer current.
Now, I feel like a bag of parts. Like a cloth sack wrapped around something porcelain, that got smashed in shipping. I feel broken. But mending. Like Frankenstein’s monster, the parts re-assembled, slightly misjoined, ringed by scars. Still in the midst of loose bits, nothing in quite the right place. Misshapen, ugly, absorbed in myself.
I want to go out and live and make mistakes and recover from them and have excitement, novelty, adventure, etc, but not feel it. I want pain without hurting.
Sophie says that I clearly hate myself. I want her to be wrong.
Author: Charles Céleste Hutchins
Supercolliding since 2003
Absolutely fascinating
I’m starting to get the idea that i might be kind of boring.
I don’t talk to many people on a daily basis, which has been the norm for a few years now, but still feels a bit odd to me. So when i do get to talk, i may do it too much. My neighbor, Paula has been talking to me about the thought processes of aspies. Alas, a lot of it is extremely familiar. I compared myself to my surviving relatives and thought i must be NT, but i now suspect i may have been projecting a binary opposition on what should have been a gradation.
Ok, i don’t get people, especially not normal people. And maybe i bore them and miss cues suggesting that, say, archeological remains of medieval bell casting is not the most fascinating topic on earth. (Which is madness, because it is so clearly super awesome.)
I’ve known so many sort of awkward composers, obsessed with odd bits of things. I’ve always found it charming. I love hearing people talking about things that fascinate them. It’s performative, in a way. But awkward folks going on at great lengths about historical hapsicord tunings, well, they’re my people. I can kind of see how some folks might not dig it.
How do i feel about this? I don’t know. I’d rather be an interesting composer than an interesting conversationalist. I know these aren’t in opposition, but somehow, the idea increases my confidence in my music.
Which, alas, has been pretty low lately. I’ve been kind of suffering for art and, maybe worse, making other suffer for it – not just by boring them. Which leads naturally to the question of whether or not it’s worth it. Is my art, in specific, worth sacrifice? Is it worth being alone? Is it worth the investment of time and money? But these might be the wrong questions to ask. I had a lot more money and a much better social life when i was a software engineer, but it wasn’t sustainable for me.
I don’t know what my point is here. It’s time for me to start composing again. To paraphrase john cage, i’m going to dedicate my life to beating my head against a wall.
Long time no blog
I haven’t been posting much lately. Things are not going all that great and I don’t really want to talk about it. I blogged a bunch when I got divorced about love and relationships and blah blah blah. It was a big learning experience of navel gazing wisdom. What I’ve learned lately is that I suck at relationships. And that testosterone seems to cause belly button lint.
I’m trying to pull myself together, so I’m going to a shrink next week. And I’m going to Rome next weekend, on a whim and an invitation from a stranger. Yeah, so I’m nuts and also somewhat extravagant.
When I was getting divorced, I discovered that was poorly individuated. I’m still really fuzzy around the edges. I need to be ok with being alone. I feel a little Peter Pan-ish. I appear to be about 19. I’ve never really been by myself. I’m perpetually a student . . .. I don’t know what it means to be an adult, but it’s time I got on with it.
At the same time as I’m having angst, I’m settling into London’s queer scene which is large and friendly. I am not settling into the music scene as quickly, nor am I writing much. I understand it can be problematic to block out one’s woes in bars, especially if one isn’t getting much work done. But it’s better than sitting home by myself having angst, right? If I’m not going to write anything, I might as well not write anything in Rome for a few days. It’s all good until the money runs out.
Room for Improvement
Five months ago, I posted a video to YouTube. A few weeks later, I played it for my supervisor, who gave me some very good feedback. He suggested that I vary the sounds of it and put the voice nearer the end, in order to not give it away and consider doing something about the sameness of the video. He indicated that it was too short to be minimalist, but too unchanging to fill the entire duration.
So this is what I’ve been working on. And working on. And working on. Every change I make seems to make the video worse. Which is hardly encouraging. It’s hard to work on for that reason. And also because I picked sounds for it that make me feel very nervous and edgy. And also because the subject matter makes me squirm.
It’s not that it couldn’t be better, it’s that I can’t seem to make it better.
The deadline is fast approaching for the Transgender Film Festival (indeed, if it is not already passed) and I’ve shown this video once to a small group and gotten some feedback from the YouTube posting. It seems to resonate well with women and gender minorities / queers. If straight men aren’t moved by it as much, should I care? Or am I just annoyed because the changes I’m making are really not helping?
Can it still be part of my PhD if I can’t repair it?
None of the composed music I’ve done in the last year has been especially engaging.
Injection Report
I got registered with a new GP who suggested that I should keep stabbing myself. I should have objected. I hate doing it and I’m not good at it. For example, this time:
I shattered the ampoule and bits of it got in the T. Damn, I should have cleaned the outside with surgical spirits before opening it. I drew it into the needle and then pushed the needle into my leg. You’re supposed to draw back on the syringe to make certain you haven’t hit a blood vessel, so I did that and got air bubbles?!?! How is there an air pocket in my leg?
I decided to re-stab, but motherfucker, the needle was not as sharp on the second go. Ouch. The second time, I decided that air in my leg, must be a feature, so I pushed it in anyway.
So I put unsterile T in my leg with some air bubbles and a dull needle and my hands were shaking like hell. I am so going to get a nurse to do this in three weeks. That or a junkie.
New Information
DOROTHY: Oh, will you help me? Can you help me?
GLINDA:
You don’t need to be helped any longer.
You’ve always had the power to go back to
Kansas.DOROTHY:
I have?SCARECROW:
Then why didn’t you tell her before?GLINDA:
Because she wouldn’t have believed me. She
had to learn it for herself.
I have a French friend, Sasha, staying with me for a couple of nights. He asked me why I wanted to change my name. I gave hi a look, but before I could speak, he continued, “It’s a gender neutral name in France.” And went on to tell me that it was exceedingly traditional.
Saint Céleste was the second bishop of Metz, around the end of the third century. My middle name is “Marie”, which is a traditional masculine middle name for Catholic French men. To pick an unfortunate example, it’s the middle name of Jean Marie Le Pen.
Sasha said, you can’t get much more traditional than that, the name of a bishop and then Marie as a middle name.
It’s somewhat archaic. In the 18th century, it would have been male all the time. Now, it’s more often given to girls, but still can go either way.
All my life, I’ve wished I had a gender neutral name.
What do you mean I’ve had it the entire time?!
I had filled out zero paperwork towards trying to get my name changed. It’s a bit of a pain in the ass, obviously, especially living abroad. I was going to wait until I could also change my gender marker, which will also require a new passport – and thus a new student visa. It took me months to get the last one, so you can see why I hesitate.
It’s certainly simpler not to change my name at all. Ok, in English, it’s almost always given to girls, but it’s not an English name. Really, what was my mom thinking giving me a French name in the first place? There’s no French in my family, even, except for a rumor that her maiden name had distantly French origins. Like, Norman Invasion sort of distant.
I have a hobby, and that’s second guessing myself.
But name wasn’t nearly as girly as I thought. Plus, I have a saint day, the 14th of October. (This is something that matters in Catholic school . . ..) And the saint was a dude. If I wanted to change my name because it was much too feminine, but it turns out to have masculine roots and a masculine present, well, that changes things.
In the states, nobody will have heard of such a thing, but it’s not common there anyway and I’m not going back in the next two years, so . . . What to do? I want to work this out sooner, rather than later. It’s a funny thing, Sasha brought it up because I was changing it, but never mentioned it earlier.
I feel kind of like Dorothy in that scene in the Wizard of Oz. (that’s so so gay.)
Keep calling me Les
There’s never a convenient time to get a sex change. I mean, really. There’s always other things going on in your life that are going to get disrupted. 90% of you reading this think I’m talking about surgery (and are quietly crossing your legs, I’m sure), but it’s like a million fucking things. (Such is the poor scheduling of post teenage puberty.) One of the most annoying is the name thing.
I have a tiny smattering of people who may search for me under my given name on the internets. I’m not a famous composer (yet), but I’m out there a bit. I would like people who have got something from the first 10 years of my production to be able to find me.
If I were more radical, I would leave my name unchanged Right now, though, that’s not working for me. So I started going by the middle three letters of my name. And then I started doing music with the appellation, but I think this is a mistake. People from earlier won’t find me. It makes the “C Hutchins” on my podcast kind of inexplicable. It’s not the thing to do.
So if trying to leave my name unchanged will make me unhappy and ‘Les’ isn’t the answer, what to do? An ideal name would: Start with C. Somehow be related to what my parents might have named me (I would have my brother’s name, so I think about what they would have named him) or have a connection to my family. Contain a “Les” in it someplace, so I could keep using it as a nickname.
My uncle and great grandfather were named Charles. Ok, perfect.
So, for people searching for me on google, I can go by “Charles Celeste Hutchins.” So I’m going to publish music under that name from now on and I’ve stuck it on my email. It will go on future business cards, etc.
And you can keep calling me whatever you call me.
I’m in the newspaper
I wrote a letter to Jon Carrol of the Chronicle and he ran it. The topic is bike routes and traffic in the East Bay. I tried to make it really short, but I worry that I sounded like an asshole.
I run stop signs all the time on the Berkeley Bike Boulevards. These are bike routes that run parallel to main streets in Berkeley. The roads are very residential and have stop signs on them quite frequently. There is not much cross traffic at these signs , nor much car traffic on the streets. In some places, they are blocked so that bikes can get through but cars can’t. The system is imperfect because the frequent stop signs technically apply to bikes, but the routes would be unusable to anyone who actually obeyed them.
What I didn’t say is that I don’t cut people off or aggravate car drivers or risk my own safety. I slow down for stop signs, which, honestly, is all the many car drivers do as well. Also what I didn’t say is that the problem could be mitigated by better signage. They need to put in one set of “yield” signs for bikes only and leave the stop signs for cars. Most issues with bike routes in suburban cities like this could be alleviated with better signage, but the ideas for how to post them are foreign and would not occur to somebody who hadn’t biked overseas.
Also what’s not obvious is that taking out stop signs would greatly increase safety. People are more cautious in uncontrolled intersections and this increases safety. Accidents aren’t avoided by just carefully following the law. Accidents are avoided by people seeing each other and being careful. So either better signs or no signs would help a lot. And roundabouts. How to design to increase safety isn’t some deep dark secret. The information is easily accessible and sometimes discussed in the newspaper and whatnot, so the city planners are aware that they’ve created a situation that’s dangerous to bikers and annoying to car drivers, but they make no major changes, even when the cost would be low. Why?
Well, I’ve dealt with the city of Berkeley planning commission and I suspect that they want to share the pain of their bitter twisted lives with others and also are frequently drunk at work plus they are resistant to any kind of change at all, even when it’s entirely sensible.
Carroll cut the part of my letter where I talked about the end of the California/ King bike boulevard. The bike route just dead ends at a major street with a median strip. The Oakland bike route picks up on the other side. There is no legal way to get across the major street without getting off your bike and walking it across a zebra crossing. Cops don’t give you tickets for biking across it, but they could. Also, it’s dangerous and scary. I hate that intersection so much and yet it still seems safer than biking along a more major street.
My hope and expectation is that since we’ve passed peak oil, there will be more and more and more bikers and numbers will increase safety.
Isn’t it amazing that I can live on another continent and still be opinionated about biking in the East Bay. Don’t worry, I have suggestions for London as well, starting with replacing the congestion charge with an outright ban on private cars for non-disabled people.
Wrong Pronouns
In the last week, I’ve twice experienced old friends using the wrong pronouns in front of a third party. In the first case, I was buying lunch at a counter and my friend said, “she” to the cashier, to refer to me. The cashier stared intently at me for several moments, but was otherwise polite and didn’t say anything. It was a bit uncomfortable. Afterwards, my friend apologized profusely.
In the second instance, I was talking with a neighbor that I’ve spoken with a few times before. My friend (a different one) said, “she. I mean he. Sorry.” The neighbor stared at me a few moments, but the conversation carried on. A few minutes later, he said something about “we boys” including me. Later, my friend apologized.
Ok, wrong pronouns happen. I’ve done it to other people. People will do it to me. It’s not the end of the world. I appreciate your effort. I know it’s a challenge.
How to deal
When you use the wrong pronoun, correct yourself. You had a moment of space out, so treat it like that. We all misspeak from time to time.
Obviously, I’m not stealth, but I don’t want to be out loud and proud every moment of every day. Imagine starting every conversation with every person with “Hi, I’m queer.” Like, “Hi, I’m a queer. Can I pay for my meal.” “Hi, I’m a queer. I’d like a half pint of Guinness.” It would be a bit much. And as weird as straight people are about LGB people, it’s a bit more intense with trans folks.
My Bank
Ok, I signed up with my bank, despite witnessing what looked a lot like open racism towards Chinese foreign students. I was disturbed, but it didn’t effect me, right? Because a culture of discrimination could never bite my ass. (Attention white people: it will bite your ass.)
I went in over a week ago to change my address. The form I filled out said that I would receive a letter in the mail confirming this. The guy at the desk said it would take 24 hours to go through. He asked for my passport to photocopy. When he got the copy out of the machine, he studied it and frowned, but was polite to me. Until I turned to leave. I could feel him staring after me. As I got out on the street, I could see him, through the window, looking at me like I climbed out of the Black Lagoon.
Obviously, he must have noticed the gender marker on my passport. If I were a stronger person, I would have gone back in and asked if there was a problem, as he seemed to be looking at me as if he wanted to say something. Instead, I felt shitty about myself, lost my passport for a few days, panicked, found it again and wondered why my letter for address change never came.
I went in today to get my automatic rent payments straightened out and discovered that my address was changed. To Berkeley. All of my statements are going to California, which is not really helpful and also not at all what I asked for.
There is some possibility that the bloke that originally took my paperwork thought he was preventing fraud. Somebody came into my bank in California, impersonating me, complete with fake ID, and tried to cash a bogus check. The teller got suspicious and the lady buggered off. The bank got highly concerned, froze the account, and called me to tell me about it. And that’s what you do if you think there’s fraud.
In this case, the guy pretended to be polite, didn’t ask for any other documents or security questions and must have noted that the picture on my passport is obviously me. It has the weird reflective thingees embedded in it, so it’s also clearly the photo that came with the passport. In short, he knew that it wasn’t fraud and he didn’t act like it was fraud. He might have told himself that he suspected fraud when he threw all my documents in the bin, but I highly doubt that he was following the set procedure of the bank. Why would he ignore procedure? Because he knew it didn’t apply.
So if bank workers feel empowered to stare at me like a monster and fuck up my bank account metadata on the basis of me being a trannie, you can see why I want you to use the right pronouns. It’s my lot in life to have to deal with a certain amount of bullshit, but I’d rather not. And speaking of outing people, why the fuck is there a gender marker on my passport in the first place? It’s got my name age and picture. Isn’t that enough? Having a legally defined sex is bullshit and it’s only practical use is to discriminate against queers. You can’t marry that person. You’re going to be fucked with every time you go to the airport. It’s bullshit.
Oy, I’m knackered
Tired and going native in my speech habits, but not, so far, my drinking habits. A normal night on the town here can quite often involve vomit from over-indulgence. This just doesn’t sound fun to me. So my tiredness is from appropriately puritanical sources. I’ve been working at something called a “test setup.”
We took a hundred or so speakers and arranged them as if we were giving a concert, but there was no concert. Instead, we were testing things. We’ve got a cool Berlin guy to build us a box with 64 motorized, touch-sensitive faders. He flew in with the prototype and there was discussion of firmware. The plan is purchase three of these.
Then we tested Ambisonics which is a method of positioning sounds in space with an oddly cult-like following of users. People who like it really really like it. It sounded weird on our system. One outside observer informed us that we were sending in the wrong sort of sounds for it to work. The easy comment is that a panning system that only works with a few types of sounds is not the most useful, but that comment is unfair. A speaker array like ours turns into a sort of architecture and not all sounds work in all spaces. Gospel music is great, but sounds bad in cathedrals. It needs a room with a short decay time. Similarly, plain chant in an acoustically dead church is going to fall very flat.
Obviously, people compose for the kinds of spaces and instruments that they have. Modern concert halls are very dry and sound really good with the sort of stochastic-like short pulses of 20th century music. So it shouldn’t be surprising that our rig is going to have a body of work that sounds good with it and not as good with different controlling software.
We normally use something that’s pronounced as “V-bap”, but I don’t know what the acronym stands for. It’s equal power pan spread across three speakers to localize a sound in space and it seems to require quite a lot less math. Basically: you know that you can make a sound seem to move back and forth by twisting the balance knob on your stereo. Well, add a third speaker above and a second knob and you can make it go up and down too.
For my part, I carried things around and otherwise did grunt work, which can be a good way to learn about a system without having to ask too many questions or go to a lecture. I tried to play my phone phreaking piece, but I couldn’t get it to work on the computer attached to all the speakers, alas.
One of my favorite students in the program flew in from Spain to work on the test setup, so it was good to talk to him. Apparently he used to have an internet addiction and now he talks about strategies to stop using the net aside from getting email and how much better his life is net-free. I remain unconvinced. Besides, I can quit any time.
Still the internet has kind of begun to bore me. The social network sites are dull and give me little for my time. The news is still valuable. But blogs . . . so many of them are narcissistic and dull. Maybe I should stop.