raybear | We can never know about the days to come, but we think about them anyway.

Last night at the youth center, Breadloaf and I stuck our heads in the kitchen to say hello to one of the group leaders. She's one of my favorite staff members: she's also teaching a couple puppetry workshops for us and I just found out she's friends with Miss Rook. We were just engaging in minor small talk about how things are going and she commented on how both of us had these big smiles on our face, just beaming. Now Breadloaf has been sick with bronchitis and we've both been busy with work, but still, for the most part we've been in pretty good solid spirits lately. I said that I feel a bit guilty sometimes, since I feel like lots of folks around me are going through hard times, either emotionally or physically, but me, I've generally been in good mood, even in the midst of hard stuff. She said, "no, don't worry about it -- keep smiling."

Hopefully I didn't just jinx myself by writing about this. I also don't want to gloss everything over either -- I've certainly had moments in the past few days of feeling tired, frustrated, neglected, or having my feelings hurt. But I seem to be bouncing back more quickly than my usual slow-moving emotional self. I think the excitement of San Francisco and everything it brings (a vacation, travelling with Lowenstein, seeing

wearemany who I haven't seen in nearly a year, chest surgery) is obviously part of the reason. I think making time with friends helps. I think going to temple on Sunday helped immensely too. It's so easy to fall out of balance, for things to go awry and areas get neglected. But I need to remember it can also be easy to restore it.

In our writing workshop we do lots of free-writing exercises and for the most part I write when the kids write. Which is great for me, since it's another part of my "practice" I struggle with. Here's what I wrote last night:

I wasn't born Raymond but I can't remember it anyway. I can be reborn every morning, every day I wake up. I am new, a new person. Every seven years every cell in our body has been regenerated, so every seven years you are literally someone new. My past seven years have brought more changes than usual. Now I possess cells of desire, of passion. Cell of men and women and in-between and both. Cell of music that sings about who I wish I was and every word of every book, sitting on a shelf that I haven't read. I'm a freak, not just because others would say that but because sometimes I feel freakish, feel I stand out. But I learn to be okay with it, to be on all sides, to be your man, your boy, your fag, your butch, your femme, and maybe, even once, your lady. My outsides and insides are a tangled confusion of gender and sex, desire and love, anger and frustration. I sit in lotus positions and breathe deeply. I stand at turntables and spin songs. I sit at keyboards and type page after page of words. All of this to keep sane, all to help me find who I am, at any given moment and every given moment. It changes with my cells. My desire shapes them, kills them off and gives birth to new ones. I reform my body but not my brain, according to science. These cells stay permanent. But not according to me.

Let's also hope the stress of next week's election won't cause this all to unravel either.