I showed up really late to the sound check because I under-estimated how long it would take to get there on Bart. It took twice as long as I expected. I was in an unhappy mood with being late and not really knowing what I was going to play. The show was booked as a duo with Polly but, obviously, she couldn’t make it. I realized that I had been looking forward to seeing Paul at the show and felt more sad.
There was a recording crew there who had set up a bunch of stuff for me. My computer wouldn’t boot when I got everything all plugged in. It does this every single time I go on stage. My computer has terrible stage fright. I couldn’t figure out if it was me being weird about how I was pushing the start button before shows or if something else was up, so I set Nicole to work on it while I ate something. I learned that my mac won’t start if there’s stuff plugged into the audio jacks on the side. This explains why the only time I have this problem is shows and rehearsals, and why I don’t have it at every rehearsal, only the ones that I’m stressed enough about to reboot before starting.
Sound check was a bit wonky, but I had faith the levels would be ok, given as I was sitting in front of a mixing board. I was kind of testy with the recording crew. I was excited about recording when I thought it would be a duo, but a solo is much less exciting and I hadn’t really worked out the best audio routing and it wasn’t coming to me then. I just sent them my stereo signal that went to the speakers, but now I wish I’d sent a separate feed of my synth. I also left the didj at home because there was a major storm and I didn’t want to take it on my bike in the rain. Also, it takes a lot of concentration to both play the didj and sample and process it at the same time and I don’t have a HID set up for that yet. I didn’t think I was mentally up to doing it without a flute to hide behind and while I was feeling so scattered.
Damon and Jen were up first. They played a really energetic set. It’s funny watching Jen on the trombone, because it’s not all that different from tuba, so I knew exactly how she was getting most every sond she got. There are some important differences though, what with the slide and the significantly higher pitch. She didn’t do silly slide glisses at all, but she used her voice in an interesting way. When you do voice multiphonics on tuba, you get an interesting sort of FM. The trombone appears to be different, or else she wasn’t doing multiphonics but interspersing voice with lip buzzing. Also different is that her voice was much closer to the trombone range than most people’s voices are to tuba.
I spent most of their set looking at Damon, because I don’t need to look at a brass instrument to know how it’s being played and I like to understand how sound is being made when I listen to it (ironic given that I’m a laptop guy). He had a whole bunch of bows and more or less attacked his instrument with them and also with a chopstick, his fingers and a large screw. The bass has a really fast response time in that when you hit a string it goes right away – unlike other low instruments where you have to wait for a sound to wend it’s way through a series of tubes. (A bass is more like a truck.) You can hit one string and it starts going right away and you can move very quickly to another string or even play multiple strings at the same time.
Damon and Jen sustained a frenetic pace through almost all of their set. they started fast and stayed fast. After the whole evening, Jen was jumping up and down. Matt D joked that she must be taking multivitamins. Their last piece, though was more subdued. Damon announced that they’d be playing Drescher’s Requiem in honor of Paul and Polly. That piece is largely made up of longer sounds which gradually rise in pitch. It’s subtle, but anguished. It was one of the better requiems that I’ve ever heard. Possibly the best.
Then it was my turn. I felt a lot better after eating a burrito and hearing Jen and Damon’s set. I played my minimodular synth and routed it though my simple looping program that I wrote for processing flutes. I had figured out how to gracefully add some extra features but hadn’t had an opportunity to code them in, so I was really playing with the flute version. Playing with my own synth is different than playing with another person in that I know ahead of time when the sound is going to change because I’m causing the changes. But, like with another person, I don’t know what the changes will be, really. There was some time where I had silence not because I thought it would be a graceful moment to add some, but because I had no idea where the sound went. The Evenfall minimodular is a tricky and subtle beast.
I did a lot of work to really get aligned timing when I wrote my sampling program, but I realized that it would be useful to allow for staggering the loop point. Or to divide by 3 or 5 sometimes instead of always by powers of 2. A (more or less) dead-on beat is perhaps most useful for flute, but with something I’m playing myself, allowing a syncopation could be valuable. I never got my p5 glove to work, alas. It seemed to be generating OSC. At the very least, the driver for it clearly was able to get data from the glove, but I couldn’t retrieve said data in SuperCollider. A glove interface would be really great for didj processing or tuba (if it were lefty).
So after the second time the sound died for reasons that were unknown to me, I thought maybe I should stop, but it turned out that people were actually digging my noodling. So I played a couple more. I’m looking forward to getting the recording.
I still have Polly’s mixing board because it didn’t occur to me to return it to Clyde. She’s probably not missing it yet. I’m going to take some advantage of it. Before, Christmas, I wandered into a gallery near my house, looking for art to give away. The most affordable thing in the gallery was $200. I explained that I liked it, but that was 10 commissions for me: 20 – 40 hours of work. (I work too hard on them.) The gallery owner asked me a bunch more questions about my project and then wrote me a check asking for one! I was quite surprised. I’m going to write it today. Tomorrow is Paul’s memorial service. I sent all my visa paperwork via express mail yesterday. It’s pretty much impossible that it will come back in time for me to get my flight tomorrow, so I’ll be going to the memorial. Actually, I’d probably go anyway. Maybe I should call the airline. It’s a non-refundable internet fare, but I know there are special cases sometimes.
I don’t think I’ll be playing again in CA before I head back to England, but if you want to get on my announcement list just in case – or for next time – I will be playing here again over the summer – you can get on the list very easily! Just send an email to celesteh-CA-subscribe@yahoogroups.com (yes, that’s celesteh-CA-subscribe@yahoogroups.com ). Or check this blog. Or the mailing list also has an rss feed: http://rss.groups.yahoo.com/group/celesteh-CA/rss . It’s an announcement-only list which is really low traffic. I only post to it when I have a show coming up on the West Coast of North America.
Tag: celesteh
Do unto yourself as you would unto others
One time, I was tooling around Oakland and these two guys jumped on this other guy and started beating on him. They took off and left the other guy lying bloody in the street. This was before everybody had cell phones, but somebody passing by had one and so the cops were soon there. Nobody jumped in the middle heroically or anything, but they did call 911. And if I saw something like that again, I’d be on the phone right away, talking to the cops. For the most part, I’m not fan of the police, but they do have their uses.
And you, if you were someplace and you saw somebody about to kill another person or hurt them, you’d call 911 (or your country’s equivalent) too. I mean, even if it was somebody you didn’t really like, you might not want to jump in the middle, but you’d make the phone call. It’s the right thing to do. And, I mean, it’s not so hard to pick up a hone. You don’t have to give your name. You just have to say where you’re at and that somebody there is in trouble. You would do that, right? It’s a moral imperative.
I don’t know what it feels like to be in an agitated state. I’ve been depressed, anxious, closeted, etc, but I’ve never been bipolar and I hope it stays that way. Agitated states suck. People who are in them feel as crappy and awful and unbelievable deadenedly sad as somebody with bad depression, but with energy. Like how somebody might feel on a day they couldn’t get out of bed, but they can get out of bed and move around, because they’ve got the stamina to do it. Feeling that low and having energy to take action is a dangerous situation. A friend of mine (who I neglected to ask if I could plagiarize) describes it as feeling like you leg was caught in a bear trap. You’d do anything to escape, even gnawing off your own leg.
But if you had a cell phone, you wouldn’t gnaw off your own leg, you would call 911. And if you saw somebody so trapped, you’d call for help. And if you saw somebody about to kill somebody else, you’d call for help. And if the guy whose about to get killed is you and the guy whose about to do the killing is you, it’s still the same situation. One where you have to call for help.
So I don’t know what it’s like. I’ve never been there. But I’m in the arts and so I know a lot of bipolar people. The suicide rates for bipolar folks is alarmingly high. I’m ignorant, but as your friend, I want to remind you to call 911 in an emergency. Even if you’re going to do it anyway. Even if you don’t like the guy getting killed. Even if you don’t want to be saved.
the most futile blog post ever
Ok, so I used to have anxiety and that’s mostly vanished, thank gods, (although my first self-inflicted T shot this morning did leave me feeling kind of freaked). It made me really suck at risk assessment. I never knew if I was actually in peril or not. Danger could be lurking around every turn. I might be unprepared!
I got very concerned about being prepared. Not just having an earthquake kit, but also being mentally prepared. In a crisis, you can’t sit down and think out carefully what’s coming. You have to just react. You need to already know how to respond when something gets thrown at you. So I used to sit and think about things that might happen and how I would deal with them. I would visualize myself taking steps to respond. I practiced it in my head in case I was called to do it in real life.
I don’t even remember now what I was worrying about, but if it happened, I bet I would (still?) be on top of it. This isn’t a completely crazy idea. It’s the whole basis for fire drills. Certain dangers are so unlikely that they’re not worth worrying about. But if you live in a tsunami zone, you know the evacuation route. Because when you get the 2 minute’s notice that a tsunami has just passed under the Golden Gate Bridge, you don’t want to be looking at an elevation map trying to figure out where to go.
I don’t want to be presumptuous or anything, but some of you live in tsunami zones or earthquake zones or flood zones. And having a mental drill once in a while might be a reasonable thing to consider doing. Which is to say that if you feel like you’re in a bear trap, I don’t think you’ll be recalling and following along with my moral reasoning about calling for help. But maybe for some of you, occasional mental fire drills make sense?
You folks all have shrinks and meds and people who know way more about stuff than me. I’ve got virtually nothing to contribute to this conversation. I really hate losing people and I want to feel like there’s something that can be done. That I can do. Something to keep the folks that I care about around longer. And it’s as futile as demanding that you stop smoking and start eating oat bran. Because that’s not up to me and I don’t know what I’m talking about.
fucking hell
OLPC: Teach a man to fish
There exists, now, finally, shipping a little computer called the OLPC. It stands for One Laptop Per Child. And it’s cheap. Very very cheap. A small sum of money will get you two of them. One for you (or a nearby kid) and one for a kid in the third world. They say “one laptop per child,” they mean that they want to see that happen.
The idea being, of course, that tech will set you free. I’m all for the utopian ideals of sharing information (Mi parolas Esperanton) and this idea seems entirely noble. But OLPC is currently being sued by a Nigerian keyboard maker. They’ve got an injunction against distributing the OLPC in Nigeria.
I’m thinking aloud here and I haven’t done research, so if I’m wrong correct me.
There’s a saying that if you give a man a fish, he eats for a day, but if you teach him to fish, he eats everyday until he gets mercury poisoning and his fishery dies from being overfished. There’s no doubt in my mind that the OLPC folks think they’re teaching fishing. But fishers need bait, they need rods, they need boats. If you teach somebody to fish, but make them dependent on importing all of their tools, have you really set them free or have you just you just recruited a client?
Where is the OLPC being manufactured? I know one of the goals is to keep costs down, but if you can do green(ish – or not-more-brown) manufacturing in a country that needs infrastructure investment, aren’t you doing even more good? Why aren’t the keyboards being manufactured in Nigeria? Wouldn’t it help third world kids more to have slightly higher prices, but help create and grow infrastructure and industry in their countries? Does giving stuff away undercut and harm what tech businesses already exist?
Kids with laptops is great and I’m all for it. And I might buy an OLPC to check it out and to get that smug glow of having done something to help. But giving kids laptops doesn’t give them clean drinking water. It doesn’t give their parents jobs. It doesn’t solve any of the immediate problems of neo and post colonialization in the third world. But, man it makes us feel good. Plus, it’s cheap!
Widespread corruption in Nigeria aside, are we teaching fishing or giving out fishes?
Memorize This If You Need It
It’s easy to remember 1.800.SUICIDE (1.800.784.2433). You folks that need to know it, you know who you are. Program it into your cell phone. Just fucking remember it. And then when you need it, fucking call it.
Sometimes when you look backwards, it looks barren and bleak. And sometimes when you look forwards, the emptiness seems to stretch out forever. It’s an illusion. Your life can’t seriously be like that, or you wouldn’t have made it to adulthood. Children actually raised that way die Of natural causes. By themselves. So if you’re old enough to be reading this, you life hasn’t actually been like that. Probably, the worst is behind you. If your situation was really so low, you wouldn’t have the activity level or agency to do something so drastic. People don’t get drastic like that unless they’re on the upswing. You’ve just waited until things have gotten better and now you’re thinking of it. Call the fucking hotline number.
You don’t get to adulthood without hope. You don’t get to adulthood without love. Maybe they didn’t love you enough. Maybe they’re gone now. But that love was there or you wouldn’t be. More people care about you than you think. People love you. People have loved you.
Afterlife
Rapture Ready folks care more about afterlife than life. Other folks are like that too. Is there a heaven? Is there a hell? Do you keep getting reborn until you reach enlightenment? Do you live this life over and over and over again infinitely? Can you come back and chat with the psychic living? Is this all there is?
I don’t fucking care about the answers to these questions. There’s no verifiable evidence for any of them aside form the “this is it” one. Maybe you’ve had a person experience with talking to the dead. I’ve known people who have. But it’s not mutually verifiable. The evidence can’t be used in a scientific sense. But, seriously, I don’t care. I’m just as happy with oblivion as I am with doing this same thing over and over again in the exact way. There are bad times. There are good times. You owe it to yourself and to folks who love you to chase the good. Go out and fucking grab it and hold on. It’s an obligation. Hope is a moral obligation.
What brought this on
Polly’s boyfriend Paul died. He was a good guy. I knew him, liked him. He read this blog. I hadn’t talked to him in a long time, but I cared about him. I don’t actually know who all reads this or what they’re thinking and maybe I’ve never met them offline or even online. But some of y’all are happy and some are sad. And if you need to memorize that number, you know it in your heart. So fucking memorize it. And call it when you need it.
Fine, I’ll Stop Listening, You Win
The RIAA is now suing some guy for ripping CDs that he purchased. He’s not sharing them on the internet, he just loaded them onto his own computer to listen to them. The major labels have apparently decided that it’s a crime to put music that you paid for onto your ipod.
It wasn’t enough that they’re trying to take financial aid away from college kids. I mean, those kids were violating intellectual property rights. Taking away their financial aid is seriously an over-reaction to that and despicable, but at least the kids did something iffy. But this latest guy didn’t do anything wrong at all.
The RIAA is a member organization controlled by the major record labels. Apparently, their policy is now that they don’t want us to listen to music that we buy from them.
Fair enough. If they don’t want us to listen to their music, we can stop.
I’m toying with the idea of throwing away everything I have from a major label, but I probably won’t. I mean, I like my CDs, that’s why I bought them. And, unfortunately, some of them are probably out on majors.
But I’m completely serious about the not buying anything new on majors. This is the first xmas since I was 13 that I didn’t get any music. I didn’t ask for it and I didn’t receive it. If the major labels don’t want me to listen, I won’t. There’s plenty of great stuff out there on indie labels. I’m not hurting for CDs. Other Minds has two new releases and several of my buddies have given me their latest albums. And, of course, there are podcasts full of great music.
All of this is what’s so confusing about the major labels being such assholes. It’s not like there aren’t alternatives. They seem to think they’re Ma Bell, when that kind of monopoly hasn’t existed for years and years. Do they want to destroy themselves? Have they given up on life? Should all the record execs get on prozac right away?
There are some serious issues of power and control at play. What’s at stake is our share in our culture. Between DRM and IP and other legal wranglings, corporations want to own every aspect of our culture. They want to control information. Remember that thing where Sony installed spyware on people’s computers through music CDs. These guys think they own our computers. If we don’t secure net neutrality, they’ll try to choke off the internet as well. (Note that libertarian hero and scary, racist mofo Ron Paul is against net neutrality.)
Briefly, right now all data traversing the internet is treated equally. ISPs, who are often owned by RIAA member companies, want to make some packets privileged over others. If you go to their website, it loads fast. If you go to a competitor, it loads slowly or not at all. If they want to control all music, then it’s likely that net-surfing customers would have to pay extra to be allowed the privilege of getting to podcasts.
Which is to say that boycott is not enough, because in some sense they are Ma Bell. Does your elected representative support net neutrality?
Edit
Well, not quite. Oops. They still suck though and do make the claim that you shouldn’t rip CDs for ipod use.
Les Hutchins & Polly Moller @ the Luggage Store
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Hey Bay Area people, I’ve got a show coming up on 3 January in San Francisco. Start out the new year with live music!
I’ll be playing laptop, didjeridu and some synthesizer. Specifically, I’ll be using my live sampling application, as heard in Paris, Berlin, the Hague and now San Francisco! It will be a duo with monster-flutist Polly Moller. (Note that she is not literally a monster but her flute playing is what you would get if King Kong or Godzilla played flute – and were really good at it.)
If Polly’s name sounds familiar with you, it’s because she was the lead of the flute-fronted rock band that I played in some years ago. Her flute playing then, as now, was full of agro tones and weird-awesome sounds that you don’t expect from a flute. She’s also really fun to improv with and her sounds work really well with electronic processing. I can do stuff with her that I haven’t been able to do with other flutists.
(Also, just to add, I’m awesome too.)
The show is at 1007 Market St in SF at the Luggage Store Gallery. It’s easily accessible via BART or muni (take the N line from the Caltrain station). Admission is $6 – $10 sliding scale. But if all you’ve got is $3 or $0 or something, they’ll still let you in.
The show starts at 8 with Jen Baker (Trombone) and Damon Smith (Double Bass). Those two formed half of the Just in Time Quartet, of which I was a member. Damon was also my bass teacher. He’s really cool and knows how to throat sing. Jen is also cool, but I don’t know her work as well.
Then at 9, Polly and I are on for 45 minutes or so.
I know some people have been curious about my Evenfall Minimodular synth. Polly describes it as “vintage” but it’s less than 10 years old. They are, however, rare. A guy in the south bay made them. At the time they were new, they were absolutely your best bet for starting into analog synths. It’s small, portable, yet a fully featured modular. Like an Arp, it has a bunch of normalized connections (it doesn’t need to be patched, but can be). And it’s got a MIDI in. The Evenfall guy thought it would be a raver’s dream. I don’t know if the trance/house folks ever got into this, but, it really should have been their dream. It’s flexible enough to be anybody’s dream, since it’s modular. I’ll be patching it and otherwise being arty. So here’s a chance to see / hear it in action.
The poster image is kind of random. I was hoping to find a picture of Polly and I together, but then gave up and used this snapshot I took of a peace sign at the Cesar Chavez park
Coming Out for Christmas
On Christmas Eve, I had my handbell playing debut. It was only my 4th time holding them. They’re heavy percussion instruments, like a disassembled marimba or something. They’re exactly what the name implies: bells you ring by hand. I had some big ones, F4 and D#4. I feel like I’m ahead of the curve for only my 4th attempt. So far ahead, I finished the piece several bars ahead of everybody else. (It’s hard to come up with page turns that work when everybody reads the same score.)
My third time playing them was the day before, the 23rd. Since the bells were in Palo Alto, I stayed over the whole holiday in the South Bay. I came down for rehearsal and then had lunch with my dad. The rehearsal foreshadowed the performance for me. My mind wasn’t on the bells, but on coming out to dad.
I met my dad at a chinese restaurant. Sarah gave me a lift and my dad invited her to lunch also, much to my relief. After we started eating, I said that I had been thinking about things a long time and I was very happy to say that I was taking T.
My dad chewed on his noodles.
Finally he said something about how it might change my attitudes.
I said I didn’t think I would become a conservative, and then immediately regretted the way I’d said it.
No, my dad explained, I might start eating like my brother and want to consume vast amounts of meat!
I have been kind of craving protein lately . . .. (This kind of seals it for me in my research of the cultural equation where meat is masculinity. I need no more evidence.)
So he more or less didn’t really react. Sarah said it’s what she had expected. I hadn’t known what to expect. I felt weird about it and stressed for the next few hours.
After lunch, Sarah and I went up to the San Francisco zoo for Daniella’s birthday party. There’s an ice rink there and it was open into the night, even though the rest fo the zoo was closed. Sarah and I were super late, so Daniella’s friends passed the time looking for the lions, until they finally started skating and we joined them. Sarah wanted to look at sleeping animals in violation of zoo rules, but all we saw were gigantic sleeping reindeer and some chilly looking flamingoes.
(About 48 hours later, some zoo visitors got a very close look at one of the lions. Some poor kid was mauled last night by an escaped lion, right next to where we were hanging out two days previous. Sarah was perturbed to learn this on the news, but I don’t feel like we just had a brush with danger.)
The next day, Christmas eve, I was sitting in Sarah’s living room, trying to get a p5 glove to work with SuperCollider when my dad called with a question. He said I sounded terribly depressed. I said I wasn’t. He said he had a question for me. I said ok. He decided he shouldn’t ask me over the phone. I said ok. He hung up.
I spent the rest of the day worrying about what he might have wanted to ask. So when I played handbells, my mind wasn’t totally on it.
After services, Sarah, Daniella and I went to the house of Sarah’s mother and grandmother. They made Swedish pancakes for dinner. It was fantastically tasty, but extremely sugary. I got into a punchy, post-sugar mood and then we went to another xmas party and then another with a glass of wine or so for me at each.
I woke up on Christmas at the crack of noon. Oh crap, I was supposed to go to Brother Bob’s early to help with cooking. Instead my holiday threesome (Sarah, Daniella and I) rolled into Bob’s house at the same time as my dad. My brother and his wife showed up shortly thereafter. We all chatted and then Bob put me to work cooking. My dad came into the kitchen and asked to talk to me. We went out into Bob’s garage.
My dad looked me seriously in the eyes. I have a question, he said. “Are you suicidal?”
“What?” This was not what I was expecting.
“I spent some time on the internet reading about what you’re doing. I want to make sure you’re not suicidal.”
Oh!! He read statistics about unhappy closetted, non-transitioning people. My dad was worried about me. My heart felt slightly warmed and relieved. No, no, no, don’t worry about that, I said.
Ok, he said, In that case . . . “have you ever contemplated a cue ball?”
“What?” I asked. He repeated himself. I had no idea where he was going with this. “No, I can’t say I have.”
“You should ask your uncle about his grandfather.”
“He was a pool shark?!” One of them was a dentist in San Francisco about a hundred years ago. Maybe he played pool on the side? Here was some new family history.
“No” my dad said and paused in the way he does when he’s about to make a clever point. All this setup is the clearest part of the day in my mind. But the punchline? I can’t remember how he delivered it. My great grandfather was apparently very bald. That could happen to me. I can’t say I haven’t worried about going bald, but um. at least we were in familiar territory. My dad was trying to talk me out of something. He does that a lot. This had become just another mundane scheme to be discouraged. I felt great relief and my heart warmed even further. I might have smiled.
He turned serious again, bringing up health risks. He repeated a few times that he didn’t want to bury me. I assured him that we were in agreement there as I don’t especially want to be buried. He told me that no surgery was without risks, which is true. Then he told me that he thought my mom got her brain tumor from her last surgery, which was for a stomach problem. I expressed doubt on this, but he started talking about how her brain tumor was so agressive it could have dated from a time so recent to it’s discovery. He said that 90 percent of all brain tumors come from the lung getting punctured.
I was losing the thread again. Mom’s stomach thing didn’t go near her lungs . . .. Maybe he’s confused about top surgery? I told him that I didn’t think my lungs were going to get punctured. He just wanted me to be careful, he didn’t want me to die before him.
I told him that I was moving into male risk categories and that I would possibly live shorter, but not that much. I looked at the corner of the garage. “I’d rather live shorter and be happier.” I said. Then I smiled and put my hand on his shoulder. “Dad, you told me something really smart a few years ago. You said that if I put off dealing with my troubles now, they would just be worse later. And I didn’t want to hear it because of this. But now I’m doing it and I feel really good about it.”
He awkwardly turned to leave the garage. I felt profound relief at the termination of the conversation. And then I drank moderate amounts of alcohol for the rest of the evening.
While waiting for the train back to Berkeley this afternoon, I noticed that I was feeling kind of anxious and wondered if maybe I should have not decreased my zoloft. But man, if all I have from that is mild anxiousness the next day, well, I think I can manage.
I am so tired right now. Daniella asked me today how my mom would have reacted to my transitioning. She would have been extremely upset. But the brain tumor changed everything, didn’t it? I want to think that if she could possibly think anything now, that she would think that I did the best I could when she was sick. I think that makes up for a lot of things that happened before. And precludes any afterwards. So what’s there to think about what my mom might think other than that I did my best and if it wasn’t good enough, well, it was my best. She sent me an email months and months before she got really sick, before the surgery my dad blames, about how she was having memory problems. And I didn’t write back for some reason, I don’t know. (It wasn’t good enough, but it was my best.) And my dad struggles with that too. How could a quarter of somebody’s brain go bad without me noticing? It must have been sudden. It must not have been noticeable. It’s not my fault. Of course it’s not. She followed a very typical trajectory for people with brain cancer. Nobody notices until it’s really bad and then she lives for maybe six more months. What causes it? Well, what causes a tiger to escape from the zoo one day but another? Our very existence is so improbable, what’s a few near misses along the way? What’s a fluke when our whole existence is a fluke? I might have been anyone, prior to the moment of conception.
I imagine my parents, my dad in grad school, my mom no longer working, holding their baby. This impossible thing they just made, in their arms. And them, with money tight, dreaming dreams. Of what I would be. Their little girl. Only god could know what lay ahead. No mortal would ever do anything if they knew. And so I didn’t go according to plan, but what did?
Happy Holidays.
Pronouns: A Fast Introduction
The problem: English lacks a commonly used gender-neutral personal pronoun. Also, sometimes people switch pronouns.
There used to be a singular “they” for unknown individuals. Shakespeare used it. It’s making a comeback, but it’s imperfect as it’s never used to refer to a person that you know. There are a punch of proposed gender neutral pronouns (GNP), including Spivak and my favorites: ze and hir: “Ze laughed. I called hir. Hir head hurts. I am hirs. Ze feeds hirself.” Of course, the way to get things into common usage is to use them.
Ok, so what about people who change pronouns? Obviously, the solution is to refer to them the way they wish. If you don’t know what you’re supposed to use, go with a GNP.
Then, there are temporal issues. I know some folks who have transitioned. Some I only knew afterwards, but know stories about them that are from before. I usually tell those stories with the pronoun that I’ve always used. “When she was a boy, she went to math camp.” Then, there are folks I knew before they came out. I use the pronouns that matched them at the time of the story. “She was a Mills student then, but now he’s at UCLA.” If I’m talking about a public figure or writing academically, I’ll use the current pronoun. “Wendy Carlos was still known as ‘Walter’ when she released Switched on Bach.” I can’t imagine a situation where using the most recent pronoun would be in error.
For myself, I prefer male or gender-neutral pronouns. Since I haven’t really changed appearance much, I think it would be unfair for me to get annoyed when old friends refer to me as ‘she.’ Mostly, it doesn’t bother me, but sometimes it’s like fingernails on chalkboard. I feel so much more comfortable with being ‘he’ or ‘ze’ that my tolerance of ‘she’ is declining. I mean, imagine if everyone referred to you for a day by the wrong pronoun. That would be really weird and uncomfortable, right?
Christmas Letter
Dear Friends,
It’s been quite a year for the Hutchins / Wilkins family. We started out by moving out furriest member, Xena the dog, to Europe with us. She didn’t much enjoy the flight, but soon settled into her new home in The Hague. We took her with us on several trips.
Last May, after Les finished the Sonology course at the Royal conservatory of the Netherlands, we set out to bike along the Loire to follow in the footsteps of Joan of Arc. We went from Orléans to Tours in several days, taking Xena along with us in a dog trailer. This worked out so well that we took Xena, the folding bikes and folding trailer with us wherever we went. When Les played a gig in Berlin, Xena and the bike stuff came along too – and on further to visit Prague and Dresden. Our next bike trip left from The Hague and took us through Antwerp to Brussels. We were scheduled to go further, but the last day of that trip included several disasters, including Xena’s trailer getting hit by a flatbed truck and a junkie trying to steal Nicole’s bike. Still, after the trailer was repaired and after Les’ concert in Austria, we were off on another bike trip, this time to Copenhagen. We biked about a thousand kilometers through the Netherlands, northern Germany and Denmark until we finally ran out of good maps and took the train the last hundred kilometers to Copenhagen. Fortunately, by complete coincidence, we arrived just in time for Gay Pride!
For all of our bike trips, we usually spent the night in a tent and packed it and all our gear up the next morning, loaded it onto the bike and were off. European campgrounds are really nice. One in France brought us fresh baguettes and croissants every morning. One in the Netherlands had pizza and beer. It was quite different than my experiences camping in the US. We hardly roughed it all, except on our first night in Denmark, where several hotels had closed, as had the advertised campground, it was pouring rain and we ended up in a hastily pitched leaking tent in a cornfield! (The next several nights were spent in hotel rooms . . ..)
Alas, soon after returning form Copenhagen, it was time to move again. In September, we packed all our stuff on boxes and mailed to the US and England. We would soon be separated, but first Nicole helped Les move to a new home in Birmingham. Les expects to get a PhD at the University there in music composition in 3 or 4 years. So we loaded our bikes again, took them to a ferry and moved Xena to England. Once Les was settled, Nicole returned to the US, where she applied and was accepted to San Jose state University’s Library Science program. She will start her masters degree in the spring of 2008.
Les’s program is going well in England. Due to a visa mix-up, Xena is wintering in the UK, while Les takes a much-need vacation on the West Coast to catch up with old friends. This unexpected time off has provided Les with an opportunity to pursue a long sought-after sex change and he started taking male hormones in December.
We hope your year was filled with blessings and wish everybody a happy 2008!
(I’m half-tempted to mail this.)
(edited to incorporate Vince’s suggestions.)
I don’t want to be whiny, but
. . . but since I cut my zoloft dose in half a few days ago, I’m starting to experience negative emotions like a normal person. Er, yeah, only minor headaches from withdrawl, so that’s good. And in other health-related news – (I used to think that getting sent to hell would mean spending an eternity at a dinner party where the person next to you described all the minutiae of their health concerns in great detail. I hope my blog isn’t too much like that.) I went to SF yesterday to learn to give myself my own needle sticks. I was thinking maybe I could just look it up on wikipedia and try it that way. I mean, how hard can it be? Yeah. so the nurse showed me how to do it, but I didn’t do it myself at all. Actually, I was kind of freaking out when she jabbed me with the needle. She seems to think it will take me a few months before I’ll be able to do it. Alas and woe. Not only is it a pain to get in to the clinic, but I’m paying out of pocket for getting somebody to prick me.
In case you’re wondering how to give yourself an injection into a muscle . . . first wash your hands. Then swab off the top of the bottle containing the injectables. Draw some air into the needle. Stab the bottle with the needle. Push the air out into the bottle. Draw back (a lot) to suck the sesame oil into the needle. Stare at the needle as the oil slowly trickles in. Push up on the needle until the black plunger is even with the 1 ml line (or with whatever line you need). Flick at the needle to get out big air bubbles (these aren’t such a big deal when you’re trying not to hit a vein). Take the needle out of the bottle. Fine the “belly” of the target muscle. If you’re covered with freckles and moles, you can use these for navigation. Clean the spot with rubbing alcohol. Relax the muscle. No, really. Try exhaling. Relax it. Really. They tell me this is possible. Hold the needle perpendicular to the skin to be stabbed. Relax, damn it. Jab yourself. Stay relaxed (ha ha ha). Slowly push extremely thick oil out and into your muscle. When you push the plunger all the way down, the needle will suddenly (and somewhat painfully) retract. Put on a bandaid.
Yeah, so as soon as the needle stabbed me, I clenched up like a mofo. This is undesirable because it means that I won’t absorb as much and because it really smarts today. The needle starts tearing up my poor muscle when it’s all clenched. Ouch. Once every two weeks isn’t all that often. This isn’t overly traumatic or time consuming. Using the jell would probably be more hassle. But, alas, this is annoying.
Anyway, I went out for lunch today with an old friend. And when he asked “what’s new?” I took a deep breath and said, “not much, how about you?”
October 11th is National Coming out Day. Once, in the 90’s, I played a concert with the LGBT marching band on that day and the conductor gave a rousing speech about how everybody should come out. It was such a big deal in the 90’s! You don’t even know. But at some point, I just sort of, well, stopped. I haven’t come out in ages. I mean, it’s one of the advantages of being visibly queer. I can mention my girlfriend once and folks look at my wardrobe and then we all rely on common sense. So I’m not in the habit of coming out.
I got my haircut last night and I worked up the courage to tell my hair dresser and she squealed her delighted support. (I love San Francisco.) And then, I was at a bar after wussing out on my injection and I told a guy I know and he said, “really? That’s awesome!” (again, I love San Francisco.) And, I mean, it’s a big deal, but it’s cool and stuff. Like, I dunno, coming out always seemed so serious, like some sort of civic duty. I guess I could say to folks, “hey, I got a new girlfriend! She’s awesome!” and that might be coming out. And that’s more what this is like. So I get all worked up and don’t want to come out because it’s intimidating, when it should be more like having an awesome new girlfriend. But, alas, I’m still intimidated.
I called my brother today and asked if him if he was keeping up with this blog. Yep, he is. (Hi Paul.) On the one hand, it’s kind of impersonal, but on the other hand, it’s a really awkward conversation. Traditionally, people send letters, but that seems to dramatic. This is the 21st century. I think most folks might tend more towards being surprised than shocked. Writing a letter makes it seem more shocking and scandalous than merely surprising. Anyway, my brother was really cool, which is what I hoped for.
And I called my dad today and . . . we debated whether or not waterboarding is torture. And then my head exploded. I’m going to tell my dad in person. (My brother said, “doesn’t he read your blog too?” Um, I don’t think so?) Then I can hear his theory on the difference between the left and the right in America. He seems to be very pleased with the theory and wants to disclose it in person. It has something to do with evolutionary theory.
I still have no mail form my letting agent. I’m starting to suspect that I won’t be able to get on my booked flight back to England, since I still don’t have everything I need to apply for a visa and it’s less than a week form xmas.
It’s been raining like crazy and apparently, my building had construction defects related to the water proofing. So we just started getting those fixed, like, the day I got back here. This is not the best timing to be peeling the skin off the building, since it’s actually raining a lot. Predictably, it started leaking a couple of days ago. Today, the leak was fixed. And then it started raining again and now there’s more leaking. The water has punched a hole in the ceiling, which is dripping in earnest. And the plasterboard of the wall is getting all messed up.
Oh, yeah and when I tried to install Mac OS X 10.5, it said I had a bad master boot record and refused to mount my hard drive and then some files disappeared when I rebooted in 10.4 and I fear my hard drive might be dying again.
And xmas shopping? Barely started.
So yeah, my home, which I own, is leaking. I have to come out to my dad. And all of my friends who don’t read this blog. (BTW, if you’re reading this, you should feel empowered to tell people. I mean, I should probably tell my dad myself and also my godmother, but friends and acquaintances can gossip to their heart’s delight – just as if I had an awesome new girlfriend.) The conversation with my brother went really well, but was still stressful just to have it. I have to be able to stab myself in the leg while keeping it relaxed and have pain from failing to be relaxed last night. My immigration status is still in disarray. My computer’s broke (maybe), and I don’t know what to get you for xmas. And I wanted to whine a bit about these things: *whine* ok, thanks.
Um, on a more positive note, I had my second shot. There was a blog several months ago called “The Man Project” where the writer gave herself a dose of T and chronicled what the two weeks were like. My experience was very similar to hers. After two weeks, your body is still treating it like a one time fluke. The first sign of non-flukiness is zits. I started getting them in earnest on Sunday or Monday. (I know I said my voice was lower. One of my friends says the lower pitch is in my normal range for when I’m relaxed. So it’s only a sign of happiness, which is nice of it’s own right.) I’m all, like, happy to have zits. I bet the novelty of that won’t last overly long! Ha ha ha ha!