hanging my tomorrows on the bones of yesterday

So the alpha version of this was a comment thread made somewhere else, that sounded really gender essentialist at the beginning. Which is a problem, and thank you again to the friend who pointed that out. So now I'm going to talk around this subject and see what I can get to fall out.

I want to have things that "belong" to enbies and other varieties of queer people. I want to know that the cultural things we invent, we can use to signal other like-minded folks without those things getting co-opted as the new fashion/trend and assumed to be part of binary culture, which often happens. Maybe not every single thing we invent, but surely a few things would not be too selfish. At the same time, that doesn't mean I want to have rigid gender norms for enbies (and binary ppl, either), and I realize telling people what they can and can't wear or do with their hair is at best problematic and at worst gender essentialist. It just sticks in my craw that 'phobes who want my queer ass to not exist will cheerfully use folx' cultural markers to be trendy and then turn right around and discriminate against us while wearing pieces of queer culture. It's irritating as shit, and I don't know what to do about it, which irritates me even more. Ugh.

Also, I think part of what draws some folks to those fringe/countercultural practices like hair, makeup, and clothing styles outside the norm is that we are reflexively identifying with being outside the norm, that we feel the pull even if we're not ready to claim a queer identity yet. So I get wanting there to be gray area for people to take baby steps into. Wanting a super-short pageboy hair cut was absolutely egg behaviour on my part, and I could not have explained at the time why I wanted it. That might also be weak evidence that someone is gravitating toward others of our kind. So I don't want people who still think they're cishetcetera to be like, banned from ever having an edgy haircut, and so forth.

I dunno. I want to have options that are outside of the Masc Dude/Femme Chic binary, that don't keep getting co-opted by the cishet binary identities. Like, one time I literally dyed my hair the bisexual pride flag colors, (icon related), and people just thought it was "pretty" and didn't put any kind of thought into why it was those colors in that configuration. *sighs forever* USian culture needs to start teaching people media literacy and it's applications to real life. We need to ask questions about where stuff came from and what it means. Sometimes a cigar is not just a cigar, etc.. When people pick a style, maybe we should start asking what it's going to mean to the people who invented it, or at least have some idea who those inventors actually were.

Anyway, if you have thoughts about this, or adjacent to this, I'd love to hear them.

A month before Christmas, when I decided on Teh Sekrit Projekt of making an anime music video for Ghost for Christmas, I basically knew the barest essentials of how that worked and assumed that it would take a few weeks to learn how and make the first one (which would suck, as first attempts do) and that it would take me less time to do each successive one. By Christmas I would have three AMV's and one of them would likely not suck and be his present. In theory. That was the plan.

In reality, I had no clue how much there was to learn, how steep the learning curve was, or that my previous experience of visual editing programs like Paintshop and Photoshop would offer little framework on which to pin new data. I had no real understanding of the digital formats or the programs used to decode and manipulate them. I gave myself headaches trying to learn it all by Christmas, and still failed. I'm still only mostly through with learning how, and about to start transcoding to a lossless codec, which is step 8 in a 19 step process. And I'm still on my first video-making journey.

I realize that it's arrogant, but it's messing with my self image that this is so hard to learn. I'm used to being good at things! I'm used to data just slotting into place in my brain and staying put, but so much of the technical language is in acronyms that, I kid you not, are *one letter different* from other acronyms that mean opposite or tangentially related things, and the structure of the information is built to do a lot of separate tasks (in separate programs, each of which you have to learn to use) that do not mesh in any organic or intuitive way. Not only did I underestimate the investment necessary for this project, I erred by an order of magnitude.

Now that I understand the basics, the rest is fine-tuning and fiddling with the programs until I get proficient. I think that because of my decent visual memory and access to several large music collections, that actually making the vids will be the pleasant sort of challenge, but right now the "I'm good at stuff"/"I suck at this" cognitive dissonance is driving me up the wall, and I'm trying not to snap at people now that so much of my patience is being used up on non-people things. So much of my ability to process feelings is going towards fending off the unbalanced emotional reaction I'm having to this frustration that I'm spending as much time goofing off and avoiding reading the fucking manual as I am reading it and following its instruction in the programs.

It feels like a threat to my identity, and in all fairness that probably means that my identity needs challenging. But it's a good thing I'm good at being uncomfortable, because this is crazy-making.

This week is like being 14.
Migraine out of fucking nowhere? Wait- that's not true. I totally should have been expecting this. If gluten can be a hidden migraine trigger, and as much as I was looking forward to never having another migraine now that I'd gone gluten-free, in hindsight it makes perfect sense that gluten exposure would have migraine as a sequela. My bad. Somewhere I had the note to myself to never leave the house without medicine for migraines should one occur, but my vigilance this week is dependent on the amount of concentration I can muster, which is not much. I'll put up reminder post-its on the door after I post this entry.

( My week, ladies and gentlemen: )

If you do not wish to hear the tale of stress and ZOMG CAPSLOCK WOE, you do not have to ( click here )

That is what I have been doing instead of commenting y'all's posts. Things will calm down by the fifteenth, and I promise not to kill anybody or shake people 'til they make sense. But right now I'm a bit on edge.

I saw Half Blood Prince again today, and GLEE for the 4th time. In my life I've seen Titanic 4 times, AKIRA 5, Moulin Rouge 6, and Romeo + Juliet 14 times, and Dune so many times the cassette tape wore out. Who else does this? Do you have any insight as to why we do it? Or is it purely the enjoyment factor of the familiar?

In other news, according to Xenoix, I've never talked about being in therapy . . . which I don't actually believe, because when do I not talk? But it's vaguely possible, and I'm pretty sure I've only mentioned it here in passing. Behind the cut tag will be a ( massive entry on my being a headcase and the first bit of how I got better. )

My brain does this thing when there are deep, important conversations that I'd rather avoid having with myself, where it distracts me with cool things that will keep me busy in contemplation for a while. I'm getting better at just noting them down for later and moving on to the more important stuff.

# People like me aren't dangerous because we're bad, we're dangerous because we defy classification. There can be no such thing as informed consent when dealing with the unquantifiable. That's why people are afraid of the unknown. It's a consent issue.

# We don't get to choose what we mean to other people, and what people mean to us is not what they are, no matter how much they mean to us. It's the first time I've been able to articulate that, but I've held the belief for a long time. Now I can back-figure for the reactions of people who don't believe that, and have a more accurate view of them.

# My spiritual practice involves dirt. I don't know how I keep forgetting that being in dirt and fixing my garden reconnects me to myself, but there it is.

# I realized that broadening my experiences would give me more, quantitatively, in common with other people, but that was after I was already doing it. I think I started because I was frustrated with what I would eventually learn to call re-contexting. I saw the same facts other people had, but I knew I didn't see them in the same way, and I was tired of being confused at the difference.

And let me just say that professional jealousy is weird. I'm proud of myself for figuring it out, and for triaging it for future fixing, but until the economy picks back up, some of my coworkers aren't going to be doing as well as they had been, and most of my regulars are pain clients, they're not going anywhere. There's a little less friendly tolerance of me than there was before Thanksgiving, a little less warmth to the breakroom conversations, more odd looks. No, I haven't pissed anyone off, and even if I did, the two other people who are still booked wouldn't be getting similar treatment. >:[

It's very human to feel threatened by someone who has the things that you want, but it's not a part of humanity I can share in. So I just get to be uncomfortable in a new way for a bit.

Whatever.

Sorry I haven't been online and keeping up with the flist. I've been catching up with a few long-lost friends and doing upkeep things in the real world. But fear not: my LiveJournal obsession is alive and healthy.
To save having to have this conversation with several people, I'm just putting it here. It's kind of embarrassing, but it needs doing. Questions are welcomed, but for once I am going to give the touchy-subject warning. For serious: no teasing me about this, or I will be interesting to you. In the Chinese fashion.
( I have brain damage, but I don't talk about it much. )

I've been in three wrecks wherein the car was totalled (or should have been) and I've never been hurt. Everyone I know has some similar story of something that inexplicable doesn't go wrong for them- 'luck' you might call it. Because we are different, the world doesn't work the same way for any of us. Because of the differences in experience and essence, no two people understand the world in the same way. We all speak from our own vantage on the world, and so we all speak a subtly different language.

When you and I are talking you're speaking in your language and I'm hearing it in mine. And there are . . . translation gaps. Some of what you're saying I get, and some of it I think I get and it's not quite accurate, and some of it I'm not going to understand at all. But it's easy to forget that the two languages aren't the same. It's easy to think I know what you're talking about, until there's some obvious misunderstanding. And then we can feel the distance between us, and even though the distance has been there all along it still leads to frustration.

Now some have a take on this that says that if we try to all have the same experiences and live as alike as possible that maybe we'll understand each other better. Maybe if we aren't unique we won't feel so alone. And this is a beautiful wish. But like a lot of pretty wishes it's neither possible to live within a mold nor would it make us any more able to reach one another. Part of what makes us want to reach out to other people is that difference. Getting to know someone is always an adventure. If we're alike then we know each other aready, even having never met. And then what you have is interpersonal apathy. Where's the fun?

So you are stuck between two fallacies, whenever you communicate with someone: thinking that you understand, and thinking that you want to understand. And despite the impossibility of the situation, we all keep trying because even though it sucks when things get screwed up it's fun trying, and it's beautiful when you do manage those rare glimpses of the world through the eyes of another. So you have to challenge a lot of assumptions, and put a lot of effort into understanding the differences. And sometimes you have to have faith, make the leap, and trust your intuition that says that the gap isn't as big and scary as it looks. You have to recognize that change is taking place all the time, and that there's no way to account for it, because all true growth is a leap in the dark.

And still we talk, make friends, influence the world, change our minds, rearrange all the pieces of the puzzle. And it's confusing, but it's our nature. And when we come to terms with it, there's a sort of peace there, knowing that you haven't been duped, that everyone isn't doing it on purposes, that you're only as confused as everyone else. There's no conspiracy, no plan to keep you in the dark, it's just how things are. Things have always been this difficult, wars have always been fought for reasons of this same miscommunication, human interaction has always been precariously balanced, always been a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that wasn't there.



And then you look around with eyes of wonder, that you're here at all. And sometimes you find the cat anyway.