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9 years ago
I've been absent, and for that I'm sorry.
SEPTEMBER
My sister started her freshman year of college as I started my senior year - but while I was staying in Chicago, she's left for Minnesota. I've been drifting out of contact with her, but it is rather nice to cook or apply makeup without her critical eye for it, it was withering for someone like me who's shit at those tasks. But my parents were drifting out of empty nest syndrome.
I started my senior year on the gender-neutral floor of a dorm building. It was a rather nice room, though I realize I should have sprung for a two-person rather than a four-person. They were uncomfortably uptight, they had glade air fresheners in every outlet and glass ornaments and wooden plaques with inspirational slogans on them. It was like living with someone's aunt.
So: to make space for a dresser to make space under my bed (it was a very cramped living space), I removed the big heavy sliding doors from the closet when I moved in. Later that night, I needed to move those doors to access the outlet next to my bed. The door slipped from between my fingers and fell across the toes of my left foot. The little toes were numb for days, but seemed to be alright. But you know how nails are convex? The pressure forced the nail of my big toe downward and it ripped out of my skin on all sides. I'm now minus one toenail, in excruciating pain, foot covered in blood (to an autistic person who gets sensory overload, all pain is excruciating. My brain can't tune it out. It hurts just as badly three hours later as it does when it began).
This is my first day, so I have no first aid equipment. My incoherent screams draw my roommate, I plead for him to get the R.A. for gauze and bandages and antiseptic. Discarding all lower clothing (as a former Scout, that's your reflex is to remove any clothing that would pass over the injury site and possibly infect or irritate it), I washed it off in the bathroom and wiped off the blood as best I could.
When the R.A. came, she was unwilling to enter the bathroom, but I persuaded her through my screams to leave the bandages and neosporin and such on the counter next to the door. I had no means of shielding myself other than the ones I used - I hadn't even showered in here, I had no towel yet, and all the towels were owned by the roommate who faints at the sight of blood. Throughout, I was screaming at myself as well, for being so incompetent as to drop a door on my foot. Mentally drained and short of blood, I bandaged it and slept for ten hours. The next morning I cleaned off the blood.
Four days later, I was called into the office and informed that she was uncomfortable with how all this went down, but I assumed that meant we were working on it.
Six days after the incident, I was called into the office again, and informed that the R.A. had filed a Title IX case, feeling sexually uncomfortable with a trans woman screaming incoherently, half naked, and covered in blood. This being my third strike, and to avoid proximity to her, my housing contract was revoked (read: kicked out of, and now banned from, every dorm in the college). That night, I called my parents for the car, and systematically RE-packed everything I'd unpacked six days ago, and that was that.
Having lived in the dorm for less than a week, I was eligible for a refund.
Since then, I've commuted to class from home, a couple hours as it goes. My therapist and I agree that even if I found off-campus housing, it wouldn't change my essential anxiety about this. This is now my ninth living space over a three-year span of college. I never want to have another blind roommate ever again (my parents never had roommates they didn't already know, so they're sympathetic and amazed I survived so long). All my anxieties about being too autistic to live with people appear to have been validated. The wound was infected for a while, but now, against all odds, I'm growing a tiny stub of toenail back. It'll probably be all gross and fucked up, but at least I'll have it. I keep trying to open doors with my stocking foot or scratch myself with my bare toes, and don't notice that I still lack that nail. Very soft and strange.
So that sucks. I'm now living at home and banned from the dorm system. I meant to tell you this two months ago. I'm just... I'm recovering.
OCTOBER
Taking part in a proprietary Portfolio Development class, and it's led to me getting an actual website and portfolio up, and a working reel.
Also, I've been promoted to ART DIRECTOR of the student group senior film I'm on... responsible for the color models, layouts, and supervising our background painter... but since we have nine people (the other film has 22), it's nice to be able to discuss things and introduce random new ideas, but it also means it's a fuckton of film work. We've got the reel all but completed, story all but set. So now I'll be swamped.
My point is that furry artwork has been very low in output from me.
NOVEMBER
Like most of Chicago, I drank myself blind the night they won. It was Tokyo on the day of the parade, though. Five million people. Biggest gathering of people in the history of the Western Hemisphere, and biggest secular gathering ever recorded. Bizarre to think about.
Monday, I managed to sign up for classes. Probably going to start tailoring myself for preproduction art, it seems to be the part of the process that interests and fires me up the most. And I have an apparent skill for asking the questions an audience would ask, or thinking of ideas in terms of the unmade film.
I spent Tuesday evening crying in a Canadian's arms. I'm really, really fucking scared for myself now. All my dresses, skirts, makeup, bras, whatever, are all in a bag in the back of my closet until I know for a fact it's safe. Marched in the Chicago protests, got the news about Onyx, Kodalynx's cat down there. If anyone wants to join an antifa league, I'm down. Until we make the streets safe for minorities again, I'm redoing all my schedules so I'll be home earlier and safer in the evening. Tomorrow I discuss with my therapist, having already informed my psychiatrist, that I may choose to get my gender legally changed in the next couple of months, while it's still an option. Really fucking scared. If any of you know a good way around Canada's closing the greencard marriage loophole (or whatever color card they have), let me know. (You know me and how familiar I am with Canadian culture, customs and history, as well as how vulnerable I am as a trans queer neurodivergent communist in Trump's America, I'm not just fly-by-night about the possibility.)
Through this entire time I'm monitoring my health. I've had almost constant heartburn that I'm not sure isn't an ulcer,, and physical heart pain and soreness from beating anxiously too often and staying awake too often. It may be enlarged. Pray for me in that. Also learned that I probably have a low form of asthma - it doesn't impact me unless I'm toking, then it punches me in the lungs. Burning lungs, burning stomach, burning heart, increased body temperature, achy joints, and I've been having migraine headaches and extreme sensitivity to light. I've become so anxious the stress hormones are building in me and fucking me up. Everything just hurts, low burning. Maybe there's some malnutrition involved. More bananas. I want to start a band before I die. Building up my musical skills. Far behind in my book reading. Drawing now feels like a strange indulgence and I think I'm losing my visual grammar... I miss Mike Sporn so much. 2016 can eat a dick.
SEPTEMBER
My sister started her freshman year of college as I started my senior year - but while I was staying in Chicago, she's left for Minnesota. I've been drifting out of contact with her, but it is rather nice to cook or apply makeup without her critical eye for it, it was withering for someone like me who's shit at those tasks. But my parents were drifting out of empty nest syndrome.
I started my senior year on the gender-neutral floor of a dorm building. It was a rather nice room, though I realize I should have sprung for a two-person rather than a four-person. They were uncomfortably uptight, they had glade air fresheners in every outlet and glass ornaments and wooden plaques with inspirational slogans on them. It was like living with someone's aunt.
So: to make space for a dresser to make space under my bed (it was a very cramped living space), I removed the big heavy sliding doors from the closet when I moved in. Later that night, I needed to move those doors to access the outlet next to my bed. The door slipped from between my fingers and fell across the toes of my left foot. The little toes were numb for days, but seemed to be alright. But you know how nails are convex? The pressure forced the nail of my big toe downward and it ripped out of my skin on all sides. I'm now minus one toenail, in excruciating pain, foot covered in blood (to an autistic person who gets sensory overload, all pain is excruciating. My brain can't tune it out. It hurts just as badly three hours later as it does when it began).
This is my first day, so I have no first aid equipment. My incoherent screams draw my roommate, I plead for him to get the R.A. for gauze and bandages and antiseptic. Discarding all lower clothing (as a former Scout, that's your reflex is to remove any clothing that would pass over the injury site and possibly infect or irritate it), I washed it off in the bathroom and wiped off the blood as best I could.
When the R.A. came, she was unwilling to enter the bathroom, but I persuaded her through my screams to leave the bandages and neosporin and such on the counter next to the door. I had no means of shielding myself other than the ones I used - I hadn't even showered in here, I had no towel yet, and all the towels were owned by the roommate who faints at the sight of blood. Throughout, I was screaming at myself as well, for being so incompetent as to drop a door on my foot. Mentally drained and short of blood, I bandaged it and slept for ten hours. The next morning I cleaned off the blood.
Four days later, I was called into the office and informed that she was uncomfortable with how all this went down, but I assumed that meant we were working on it.
Six days after the incident, I was called into the office again, and informed that the R.A. had filed a Title IX case, feeling sexually uncomfortable with a trans woman screaming incoherently, half naked, and covered in blood. This being my third strike, and to avoid proximity to her, my housing contract was revoked (read: kicked out of, and now banned from, every dorm in the college). That night, I called my parents for the car, and systematically RE-packed everything I'd unpacked six days ago, and that was that.
Having lived in the dorm for less than a week, I was eligible for a refund.
Since then, I've commuted to class from home, a couple hours as it goes. My therapist and I agree that even if I found off-campus housing, it wouldn't change my essential anxiety about this. This is now my ninth living space over a three-year span of college. I never want to have another blind roommate ever again (my parents never had roommates they didn't already know, so they're sympathetic and amazed I survived so long). All my anxieties about being too autistic to live with people appear to have been validated. The wound was infected for a while, but now, against all odds, I'm growing a tiny stub of toenail back. It'll probably be all gross and fucked up, but at least I'll have it. I keep trying to open doors with my stocking foot or scratch myself with my bare toes, and don't notice that I still lack that nail. Very soft and strange.
So that sucks. I'm now living at home and banned from the dorm system. I meant to tell you this two months ago. I'm just... I'm recovering.
OCTOBER
Taking part in a proprietary Portfolio Development class, and it's led to me getting an actual website and portfolio up, and a working reel.
Also, I've been promoted to ART DIRECTOR of the student group senior film I'm on... responsible for the color models, layouts, and supervising our background painter... but since we have nine people (the other film has 22), it's nice to be able to discuss things and introduce random new ideas, but it also means it's a fuckton of film work. We've got the reel all but completed, story all but set. So now I'll be swamped.
My point is that furry artwork has been very low in output from me.
NOVEMBER
Like most of Chicago, I drank myself blind the night they won. It was Tokyo on the day of the parade, though. Five million people. Biggest gathering of people in the history of the Western Hemisphere, and biggest secular gathering ever recorded. Bizarre to think about.
Monday, I managed to sign up for classes. Probably going to start tailoring myself for preproduction art, it seems to be the part of the process that interests and fires me up the most. And I have an apparent skill for asking the questions an audience would ask, or thinking of ideas in terms of the unmade film.
I spent Tuesday evening crying in a Canadian's arms. I'm really, really fucking scared for myself now. All my dresses, skirts, makeup, bras, whatever, are all in a bag in the back of my closet until I know for a fact it's safe. Marched in the Chicago protests, got the news about Onyx, Kodalynx's cat down there. If anyone wants to join an antifa league, I'm down. Until we make the streets safe for minorities again, I'm redoing all my schedules so I'll be home earlier and safer in the evening. Tomorrow I discuss with my therapist, having already informed my psychiatrist, that I may choose to get my gender legally changed in the next couple of months, while it's still an option. Really fucking scared. If any of you know a good way around Canada's closing the greencard marriage loophole (or whatever color card they have), let me know. (You know me and how familiar I am with Canadian culture, customs and history, as well as how vulnerable I am as a trans queer neurodivergent communist in Trump's America, I'm not just fly-by-night about the possibility.)
Through this entire time I'm monitoring my health. I've had almost constant heartburn that I'm not sure isn't an ulcer,, and physical heart pain and soreness from beating anxiously too often and staying awake too often. It may be enlarged. Pray for me in that. Also learned that I probably have a low form of asthma - it doesn't impact me unless I'm toking, then it punches me in the lungs. Burning lungs, burning stomach, burning heart, increased body temperature, achy joints, and I've been having migraine headaches and extreme sensitivity to light. I've become so anxious the stress hormones are building in me and fucking me up. Everything just hurts, low burning. Maybe there's some malnutrition involved. More bananas. I want to start a band before I die. Building up my musical skills. Far behind in my book reading. Drawing now feels like a strange indulgence and I think I'm losing my visual grammar... I miss Mike Sporn so much. 2016 can eat a dick.
As a PoC myself, I feel as though your insistence on this change in regime is wrong because it implies that the city streets are going to be made horrible. They're already horrible. Blacks kill each other over trivial reasons. Gay people get so discouraged with life that they just accept that they're going to get AIDS and fuck like there's no tomorrow. Hispanics are engaging in disproportionately high levels of sexual violence because of a destructive machismo culture. Women are undercutting each other daily for an attempt to climb the corporate and political ladder.
What's going on in this country is already disgusting and horrible.
You've bought into the lies of a lifetime con-man. It'll hurt you, like it has done to millions before.
The dems want to define me because I don't support them at every turn. Well fuck them. They didn't listen to me. They didn't listen to Bernie Sanders. They just wanted whatever they wanted no matter the cost.
Like: "Gay people get so discouraged with life that they just accept that they're going to get AIDS and fuck like there's no tomorrow."
That is pure strain bullshit. The rest of what you said too, but that one statement is easiest to disprove:
http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/statistics/o.....ataglance.html
You consider your ignorance as valuable as other people's knowledge.
I'm bi, and no one among the other non-hetero people I know is resigned to contracting aids. It's a risk to be aware of, not inevatible doom.
I know that the prevalence of HIV in gay men is tied to unsafe sex practices and a lack of immunological function in both anal and oral sex. What I don't know is why LGBT groups never bother to make it priority number one. Reduce infection, reduce mortality, improve lifespans. Seems kinda more important than fighting for gay marriage, don'tcha think?
Marriage equality isn't going to save lives or decrease homosexual mortality. It's principally there to make people feel better, but there are epidemic numbers of infection within a tiny percentage of the population that cuts their life down by 20 years on average, that's a catastrophic problem that has more bearing than feelings.
Also you wrote "Gay people get so discouraged with life...", so maybe the "feels" do play a role when they don't get perspectives to have a family like "normal" people and are allowed to inherit from their spouse, visit them at the hospital, and adopt kids. I can only repeat, putting on a condom or not is a matter of individual responsibility, unless you put a cop into every bedroom in the country. Getting the legal environment for creating a lifestyle that isn't just about partying and sex is a matter of the government. And it's already unlawful to have intercourse and withholding the information about being HIV positive, as I've seen from court trials.
Marriage has always been a socio-religious institution. Marriage never had legal connotations until the government decided to meddle in it. That's the justification the United States Supreme Court used in mandating gay marriage. There were alternatives: federally backed and guaranteed civil unions that legally matched marriages that only required issuance by a judge or revoking federal authority over marriage matters and handing it over to states which could then justify whatever they wished. There were options, but they took the low road and impinged upon the First Amendment of the US Constitution. That's the one thing they're not supposed to do. If someone wants to discriminate based on religious grounds, that is a federally protected right, but it was broken to accommodate a small group who had other options.
Ok, so what you're telling me is that somehow, getting gay marriage into place is going to discourage people from having licentious lifestyles that revolve around pleasure? If there's no pressure to stop that behavior, (which is a temporary, emotional positive) why would it ever stop? What exactly was stopping homosexual men in the 80s from settling down with single partners in monogamous relationships and not being afflicted by HIV at all? The answer was nothing. It's just nature. Men have naturally higher libidos than women and the two balance out. With homosexuals, you typically see the extremes. This is why lesbian blood donations are a gold standard. In addition to minimized penetrative risk, lesbian bed death is quite a common problem. Gay men are the opposite.
Trying to impose normalization of something that isn't normal in the biological sense without addressing the biology is probably not going to succeed very well. It's certainly worth trying because it's cheap and some lives might be saved, but trying to impose that normalization on everyone else that it doesn't apply to is completely doomed to failure. So instead of LGBT organizations focusing on promoting safe sex and monogamy, something that would improve life and reduce mortality, things that are tangibly beneficial and an indisputable good, they focus on making everyone else be accepting of a lifestyle. I'm willing to bet that in 10 years time, I can look at CDC stats and find only slight reductions in negative statistics concerning homosexuals. Marriage equality will have done nothing to abate it. Medical science will be responsible for all the difference. And that's what I find so horrifying about LGBT groups. Their concerns with health and welfare play second fiddle to social recognition. It's disgusting and ruins lives that could have been helped.
And if half of HIV infected gay men don't know that they're infected, how can they be held responsible for spreading it?
"It's just nature. Men have naturally higher libidos than women and the two balance out. With homosexuals, you typically see the extremes."
Then you say:
"So instead of LGBT organizations focusing on promoting safe sex and monogamy, something that would improve life and reduce mortality, things that are tangibly beneficial and an indisputable good, they focus on making everyone else be accepting of a lifestyle."
What good would that do if it's in their "nature"? Writing smart-sounding essays doesn't negate the fact you're contradicting yourself. Or is your worldview really that authoritarian? I have the feeling I'm talking to Milo Yannopolis, it's the same rethoric xD
And what the hell has the first amendment to do with people being allowed to marry? I will say I'm not a fan of anti-discrimination laws, because they actually do compromise freedom of speech, and who would want to work for or buy a cake from an homophobic asshole anyway. And about half of HIV infected gays not knowing it, since when does ignorance prevent penalization? I'm also tired of hearing "lifestyle", the only ones bothered by seeing gays in public are people who should look at themselves why they are so uncomfortable with that instead of putting their nose into someone else's business.
"If there's no pressure to stop that behavior, (which is a temporary, emotional positive) why would it ever stop?"
That right there shows that I believe you can fight nature. I believe you can fight it with concerted social pressure, the type that LGBT groups never put against LGBT people because it would demand they take responsibility for themselves. The entire movement has become about feelings. That is why it is despicable. It could do so much to directly improve lives, but it focuses on social goals against others.
And as I said, marriage is a socio-religious institution. It is not the domain of the government. You can find marriage at familial, tribal levels all across the globe. It is a facet of human social nature given its prevalence. If some people are discomfited by homosexuality and codify that discomfort in religious texts and the texts and the practice thereof are protected by a founding law, then it is illegal to contradict the founding law without first changing it. That's the concern.
You can throw the word authoritarian at me, but it's easier to apply to you. If someone forbids gay marriage, they upset about 2-3 percent of the population. Enforcing gay marriage in defiance of religions (as well as their adherents) hits whatever percentage of the population is religious and opposes gay marriage. Given the religiosity of the US and the dislike of homosexuality, that's gonna be in the double digits. And the imposition is against them and what they believe in. It undercuts their values for the sake of what they believe to be immoral and what science shows to be physically deleterious and sets the precedent for the slippery slope. That undermines the First Amendment, but more importantly, it undermines the Constitution which is to protect the citizens from the government. The language is clear, "Congress shall make no law." Applying those laws to the citizens themselves means that the government can use the law against the common man and further ideological agendas. This might not be a problem if it was responsibly applied, but the people who push it don't really care about lives so much as they care about achievements.
People wouldn't really have a problem with homosexuality if it was practiced with enough care so as not to cause plague levels of infection. Having 20% of your population afflicted by one disease is bad. There's also the matter of LGBT messages being "we're just like you" as an attempt to normalize and then pride parades come around and there's essentially just sex on display rather than regular people walking down the street with regular clothes and waving. Nah, gotta have the mock orgies and S&M to show how regular gays are. It makes homosexuals that are not defined by their homosexuality look worse by association. And really, who could blame a heterosexual person who is undecided, but is turned off by the ideological contradictions and the epidemiological distributions in the gay community?
uuuuuh
anyway just going to swing by and say the #translawhelp hashtag on twitter may do you some use in getting stuff together for legal transition.
see: https://twitter.com/PunkKitty312/st.....23384964317184
chicago-based notary if you need that
that portfolio site looks great
n just generally hope things look up for you physically n mentally soon