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I get the New York Times daily e-mail with all the headlines and at the bottom is always "On this day in [year], ___________ happened." I'm pretty sure that every year they find something new for each day, though I suppose certain things will never change, like September 11th, and I think both JFK and MLK getting shot almost always make the cut. Maybe Pearl Harbor.
I'm sure we all have certain events that have marked us in years past, on every day that passes, but 99.8% of them are forgotten. But I have two things that happened on this day that I always recall, usually on the day of, sometimes the day before or after, nowadays just a sort of passing though, a few breaths. In 1994, on this day, a friend in my high school group was shot to death by her stepfather (before turning the gun on himself). It was my first experience of death of someone close to me, as more of an adult - my grandfather has died when I was 7, but this was a peer, and this was also something extremely violent. In 2000, on this day, I went to the doctor, expecting a general check-up and a plan about when my transition would start, and instead I walked out, after getting a shot of testosterone in my ass to jumpstart my body, with a piece of paper with a prescription for androgel. I have written much more about the latter -- this blog started as a dumping ground for all my thoughts and revelations and marking time of the transition. I have written less about what happened 16 years ago, and there are certain scenes from the days that followed the news that haunt me. That is perhaps poor word choice, but it will do for now. Also, this marks the beginning of the season of dates -- holidays are coming up, and those are always about reassessing events of years passed, as well as the birthdays of both my parents and my brother.
Marking time makes us feel linear. And rather than four dimensions time promises, it instead makes us two-dimensional, flattens us out, points on a line, one following another. Cause and effect. Or even more maddening, we put ourselves on a circle, coming back around to the same point again and again. At best, it can be made a spiral, where we intersect the same plane every cycle, but at least we're higher up. (Or god help us, lower down, except that breaks the one-way direction of travelling in a spiral -- even in our three dimensional models, we like it fairly linear.)
I feel a bit flattened out. This is as much about a hundred other things as it is about remembering this day of years past. I watched Oprah this morning while doing work for my freelance gig, and fell a bit in love with John Amaechi. I made myself breakfast for lunch: bacon, whole wheat english muffin, scrambled eggs that are more spinach than egg, a second cup of coffee. I'm bargaining with myself to get some writing done. I'll practice a little guitar. And a couple times an hour, I go stand by the windows in the kitchen and face directly into the sun and squint my eyes and recharge myself like the glow-in-the-dark rubber duckys in the bathroom. Later I will take a hot bath, maybe with a crossword puzzle, or maybe just sit and listen to music and just be here, now, along with visits from those people from 1994, from 2000, from other years too.
I'm sure we all have certain events that have marked us in years past, on every day that passes, but 99.8% of them are forgotten. But I have two things that happened on this day that I always recall, usually on the day of, sometimes the day before or after, nowadays just a sort of passing though, a few breaths. In 1994, on this day, a friend in my high school group was shot to death by her stepfather (before turning the gun on himself). It was my first experience of death of someone close to me, as more of an adult - my grandfather has died when I was 7, but this was a peer, and this was also something extremely violent. In 2000, on this day, I went to the doctor, expecting a general check-up and a plan about when my transition would start, and instead I walked out, after getting a shot of testosterone in my ass to jumpstart my body, with a piece of paper with a prescription for androgel. I have written much more about the latter -- this blog started as a dumping ground for all my thoughts and revelations and marking time of the transition. I have written less about what happened 16 years ago, and there are certain scenes from the days that followed the news that haunt me. That is perhaps poor word choice, but it will do for now. Also, this marks the beginning of the season of dates -- holidays are coming up, and those are always about reassessing events of years passed, as well as the birthdays of both my parents and my brother.
Marking time makes us feel linear. And rather than four dimensions time promises, it instead makes us two-dimensional, flattens us out, points on a line, one following another. Cause and effect. Or even more maddening, we put ourselves on a circle, coming back around to the same point again and again. At best, it can be made a spiral, where we intersect the same plane every cycle, but at least we're higher up. (Or god help us, lower down, except that breaks the one-way direction of travelling in a spiral -- even in our three dimensional models, we like it fairly linear.)
I feel a bit flattened out. This is as much about a hundred other things as it is about remembering this day of years past. I watched Oprah this morning while doing work for my freelance gig, and fell a bit in love with John Amaechi. I made myself breakfast for lunch: bacon, whole wheat english muffin, scrambled eggs that are more spinach than egg, a second cup of coffee. I'm bargaining with myself to get some writing done. I'll practice a little guitar. And a couple times an hour, I go stand by the windows in the kitchen and face directly into the sun and squint my eyes and recharge myself like the glow-in-the-dark rubber duckys in the bathroom. Later I will take a hot bath, maybe with a crossword puzzle, or maybe just sit and listen to music and just be here, now, along with visits from those people from 1994, from 2000, from other years too.
