You can take the boy out of the South....

But you can't take the Southern love for pork sausage and gravy out of the boy.


( all picture taking of me can cease, because it gets no more representative than this )

Look we've seen this kind of thing before.

Hello, I am a bad queer, as I attended no "pride" events this weekend. I wish it was so simple as being jaded and bitter, in that attempt to be cool and aloof way.

The past two summers I've been at grad school during these weekends, feeling no remorse or sadness in missing the hot hot heat and sun and crowds and crowds and crowds. Instead I was hanging out in my writing bubble. [Note to self: look at why you love the bubbles, the alternate universes, the compartamentalized existence.] There is a way, I admit I sometime feel "over" being queer, but mostly its just that it doesn't seem like a big deal to me, which is a pretty spoiled way of looking at things. I mean, there's nothing wrong with the fact that I exist in my daily life pretty much out about everything and pretty much feeling fairly safe about it. But it's maybe wrong to forget that other people are on different steps and don't have the same freedom of movement. It seems to silly to be waxing so seriously about rainbow floats, and really what I've been thinking more about is transness and trans identity and being "a good tranny" and what that means for me, what ethical responsibilites (if any) do I feel I should perform. It's cocolola's fault really, because I participated in a workshop with her theater group last week and then I led another one today, both about masculinity and performing and gender (and monitoring/policing gender¹) and it was interesting to be in that headspace of thinking about where I was, how I got here, what's the story I always tell and is it still accurate, true, important. unscrambled said something else this weekend that's rattling around my brain, we were talking about something else entirely, my nervousness as a child and how that translates into my nervousness as an adult, and it's a theme in conversations about ways that I seem to be frightened of people at times, as if I somehow am NOT surrounded by some pretty amazing, loving, open, accepting people, which I am, but instead it's as if I've sustained some sort of deep intense trauma that I've forgotten that informs all these interactions, and so I'm saying this and then they said, "well, I don't know, maybe not getting to be a boy for 20something years is kinda traumatic." Hm. [Note to self: cancel appointment for regression hypnosis.] I think this is just one of these things, like other things in my life lately where I'm looking, these stories of saying, and thinking, about how I'm so well-adjusted on this area, so 'done' and finished, isn't this great? nothing to see here, let's move along to some other issue in my life that has NOTHING to do with this, I'm sure. But hi, guess what.

I don't mean to imply that this journal will take a long trip back to the Freudian narcissism phase of transitioning, so don't worry if that's what you're thinking, and by 'you', I mean 'me' because I don't really want to go there at all -- a necessary step on the path, for sure, but not one I care to repeat for the sake of my loved ones. But still. Still, there's something maybe there, in the period right after that I have not yet named loosely on a psychogist's theory of development. Maybe Maslow? No, I think maybe Erikson instead. Though I do love me a good Skinner box.

Sorry. Reel it in.

It's pride weekend. I saw none of it. I maybe feel proud. I mostly feel tired and happy to be home and glad it's not 1000 degrees and sort of wishing that maybe I had taken tomorrow off because I'm feeling a hint of depression about this Sunday night and having to go to work on my birthday to a place in a corporate building doing boring work where I don't really know any of those people. Maybe I should come out to spice up the day. Hey, I'm 29! And I wasn't born a guy! What's up with binaries and our brains needing them? Have you ever thought about making a switch? I'll type up that dictation in the next hour.

Or maybe I'll just wear my lovely new green linen shirt and eat cupcakes at my desk.

________


¹: Johnny T. and I invented a new euphemism for masturbating after a misheard bit while conversing and retelling this part. It's "pleasing your gender."