The only thing you can safely assume...

...is that it is safe to assume nothing.

Spoke with HWiPfI today, and as usual, it has my mind moving quite a bit. Aside from encouraging me to attempt to engage writers who's books I find engaging, as a means to stave off an increasing sense of alienation (though I still worry about sounding either fannish, or presumptuous), I ended up troubled by one of his comments.

Talking about aesthetics (which has notably been absent in my gender thinking speaking until quite recently), and I made the comment that I thought I wanted to try things on the girl side, at least for a while. His response was something along the lines of, "You spoke previously about fear of ghettoization; why would you want to put yourself into a more obvious ghetto where people could categorize you as trasvestite, transsexual, gay, and the like?" I admit it; I was surprised at that, such that I didn't address the assumptions I see in such a statement, but really; this is someone I've been seeing for years. Perhaps I am as bad at conveying meaning as I fear, or perhaps he's unaware of his own biases, or indifferent to them, but it seemed clear in such an utterance, to me, that the assumption was the generic idea that "everyone is fine as they are, they just need to accept that". I really find that a hollow platitude, or a horrible misapplication of Lacan. Absent in any of that was an acknowledgement that, at least at this moment, I think this is what I want.

So, I'm all pissy and stirred up now. Surely this isn't what I pay for?

Speaking of aesthetics...

This is a very pretty comic. Unfortunately, it hasn't been updated in ages, but it takes its place with other comics I like a lot as offering a glimpse of a world that I want to live in.