(no subject)

Today begins the first of the annual nineteen days during which skiadaimonos is -7 rather than -8. It's as good as any time to stop and realize that there once was a time without this person, and to be glad that this is no longer such a time.

Happy birthday: may it be a good one.

and then there were four

I finished reading The Stone Gods this weekend, which leaves only four Winterson novels I have left to read, until she writes more. There's a certain sadness, with a trace of desperation, to this realization for me. I'm not someone who can usually read books more than once, so I'm trying to pace myself, not run out too soon. I feel a touch crazy when I think about it, so I try not to, and instead focus on the works themselves.

Of all her books I've read to date, this one had the strongest emotional impact on me. It's furiously angry in places, with an anger that I was surprised to find resonate so strongly and deeply within me. It's also painfully, awfully sad, in a way that is both very personal and sweepingly general, historical and human. I would recommend it strongly, but don't know that it would have the same effect on anyone else; it feels like a marker in time for my state of mind and development, wrapped in beautiful, aching words and scintillating emotional genius. I guess that's recommendation enough.

plea to the blind idiot gods of communication

Please, please, please let someone other than me occasionally remind people that trans is not always automatically shorthand for transsexual, that there is no necessary, logical or causative expectation of transition, that transition itself can (and often does) anchor the idea that binary gender is normative, natural and desirable in all cases, that options exist other than either/or, and that the ongoing, everyday active ignorance of the above can serve the effect of silencing, diminishing, and rendering inconceivable, if not socially impossible, those who don't fit the standard model.

Please?


(translation: Prompted by reading some of the comment threads at Feministe. I know I'm a sub-minority of an already small minority, but god damn it, I still exist. Irony is apparently not dead, just largely missed.)

(no subject)

I don't want to go back to work tomorrow. I think my time is limited there, but at least at the moment, it feels like the limit will be of my choosing. That's kind of interesting in its own way.