nerdcore

passing. it may be politically fraught if you're a tranny but when you're a reluctant law student it's the best thing ever. ev-ah. below is the life and times of nerdcore tal:

still loving, still fighting

ps. i'm still alive and i still want to do that zine. watch for a zines and whisky night at the ranch. now THAT is my idea of a good time.

momentous desire

so i've decided my next project for genderschmender is to coordinate a writing project. i have been throwing around ideas. what i've been fascinated by lately is the slippery nature of desire. the way some small details can transform a situation, my sense of self and others... the way desire can suddenly be there, where nothing was before. it really sneaks up on me sometimes, particularly when i'm listening to E read aloud, curled under her arm, my body absolutely flaccid with fatigue, and then something creeps up, heats up... maybe it's also relevant to E's creeping crouching jungle tiger theory. i remember also a moment in yr 12, sitting in economics behind this boy called Andrew Skyring. He was so skinny and his head was down and the vertebrae were visible under his pale neck skin where his long hair had fallen to the side. i wanted to fuck that boy so badly. right there. biting his fragile boy body. it was like that again when another long-haired thin boy, Eden, walked toward me in the morning sun after i'd had sex with him the night before, his first time, and his hair and skin kind of glowed.

I also think these moments of desire are caught up with gender. certainly for me. The way gender can shift, even moment by moment. Moments of ambiguity, moments where breasts are unbound and suddenly soft, where hard chests bud, moments where binding shows under shirts, where voices suddenly drop, where sun catches new facial hair, when putting on a wig can transform the way i walk and talk. surely people have moments they want to write about...

i have been wondering about a working title... 'moments in desire' 'momentous desire' 'moments in body and desire'? hmmm.

shifting currents & dead chickens

Something is going on in my head. and my stomach. and my chest. Kind of uncomfortable shifting. like my emotional state is composed of seismic plates. Is that what they're called? Those massive plates of earth that groan and shift and cause tidal waves that engulf whole islands and cities? I feel restless and sad. but not really sad, just kind of frustrated and unmotivated. kind of watching myself fail law from a distance. not caring most of the time. devastated when i do engage. I think the feeling could be called 'lost'. Politically and emotionally. After casting myself adrift from uni politics, i feel like i'm wading through this political landscape that is just so unformed, barely cognisant of itself and it's hard to know where to turn or how i fit in. I think the advantage of student politics is that there is a basic calendar that gives some structure and immediate objectives.

Beyond that, i feel like everyone is as lost as me. and I find myself yearning for some kind of political mentor. an organisational structure that will take me in and nourish me and push me out of the nest stronger and with a clue about what i'm meant to be doing. maybe buffer me from the intense and pointless antagonism between leftist cliques. oh maybe i'm just yearning for a clique of my own.

I guess what i'm saying is that after doing my time in the little student politics hot pot, i've emerged to realise that I have not been equipped. I've read more Marx & Lenin than Bakunin. I find the anarchisty cliques the toughest to engage with. I feel battered and damaged by cynicism. I feel tired of being patronised by people who think being hopeful for something better is naive beyond belief. I feel jaded by people who think this is all there can be. Most of all though, i think i feel let down by my own finite political energy and passion. My own failure to be the brilliant, well read visionary that I want in my life.

and Venus died. in a tiny fitting bundle of grey feathers.

am i a loser?

i guess the toilet wall is really the proper forum to ask this kind of question. But then I would have to ask, 'am i a looser?'

The reason i have to ask this is because despite many vehement representations that i am totally ok with having shithouse law marks, I am spending the mid semester break studying every day. It's true that it's only day two today and I have also checked myspace about six million times, but that does not change the fact that my major activity is pegged 'studying contract law'. So now i wonder, 'am i really a law dork. Do i stand for everything that i hate?'

Also, i bought a white denim mini skirt at Hunter Gatherer. Oh. My. God.

never though i'd love a ging-er

here's the little eunuch. that shaved patch on his leg will grow back apparently. however, i think it looks tuff. giuseppe joe is my man even if he ain't got no balls.

gingeriffic giuseppe joe

I have a new friend and he doesn't even make me sneeze much! Does that make it meant to be? Are Giuseppe Joe and I fated to love and adore eachother? I think so. I wish he didn't want to sleep on my face all the time but this is a minor drawback in the game of unconditional love that we've embarked on.

democracy reaches new golden heights

Blonde lady of sequin dress fame strikes again! Would you vote for this golden woman? It's election time at Law School and i was really thrilled in crim class when this young lady walked in and announced that she wanted to give me MORE! It begs the question of course, how can she give me MORE when she has already given me so many hours of sniggering entertainment merely by donning a golden sequinned dress. But it appears that if i would just vote for her for president she would do her very best to deliver MORE to me. no real indication of MORE what, but i'm not concerned about that at all. We're talking about a very hard working young woman, committing countless hours to organise that most excellent institution of the LSS PTN. being the 'Pleasant Thursday Night' where, upon display of your LSS key ring and payment of only $10 you can drink truck-loads of beer or sparkling wine and participate in heterosexual mating rituals. Do you think she could arrange a homo equivalent for me? I mean, if she gave a damn about equality she would concerned that good middleclass homosexuals are being excluded from this opportunity to 'network' with other likeminded and upwardly mobile young things. shame golden woman. I am so not going to vote for her. ps. do you think her long golden locks are tickling her breasts!?

wombat

i went to wilson's prom and got a new boyfriend, beach freddy.

tear-shaped pieces of me

i didn't go to school today so i can't tell you what the first ladies of law are wearing on this Monday. ballet-style flats i imagine though. so cute but casual. Perhaps a long cardigan tied at the waist in a soft pale grey. so chic. The reason i didn't go to school is because i woke in some kind of malaise and then my phone rang and my mood found reason. and now all the world looks so different, seen through the little salty water smudges on my glasses. and now i am going to do washing, ring IKEA and make them send me the missing pieces for my shelves, take down photographs and change my passwords.

missives from the reserve section

so i'm back at school and i reckon, apart from short interludes to keep y'all up to date with the ranch's pack of chickens, perhaps i'm going to turn this into stories from the front line: one boyish little lady taking on the law school. So let me set the scene for you. Every day of my life that i spend at law school I go to the toilet and frighten small blonde and rexy law ladies who stare at me with frightened eyes. Behind the lashings of mascara i see something that looks frighteningly like mental cognition. It goes something like this, 'ohmigod. that's totally a man in the lay-dees! oh, that's just rude. no wait... *click click click. some cogs turn slowly* heey, that's not a man. ohmigod, what the fuck is that chick wearing. ew. she totally needs to get some make-up and tuck some tight jeans into brown leather prada knee-high boots and carry a darling little chanel bag. and wear a pretty top with a little belt around her waist. oh, she could look so much cuter then. yeah *agrees with self in head* that would be heaps better and i wouldn't think she was a man in the lay-dees then either. oh hey, thinking of looking totally cute. god, i still can barely believe how fucking cute i looked when i wore that sequined dress to the law ball. Check it out!

Of course, it's not that my fellow law ladies only think about how it's practically illegal for them to look that hot. No, we have been grappling with some pretty serious issues this last week. In fact, I haven't thought this much about abusive men and battered women's syndrome since i was 16 and we left my stepfather to live in a women's shelter for three months. Nor have I been this close to actual violence myself for some time. Of course if i had throttled the woman behind me in crim the other day, that would have been more ordinary assault than domestic violence. Could i plead insanity? 'Sorry, your honour, i was driven insane by the mere random recollection of that sequinned dress in the law ball photographs.'

i had an optometrist appointment this morning cause i'm getting new glasses. however i'm quite concerned that i got my eyes tested before i'd had a coffee. was i more bleary eyed than usual? also, he didn't seem as thorough as the nice man who tested my eyes in st kilda two years ago. shit man. also, another frightening thing happened this morning. i was eating esther's marmalade with sour cream on rye bread. which was odd but perhaps not totally frightening. then i wrote about this on charlotte's myspace and then about an hour later, esther texted me to inform she had heard about my eating of the sour cream with mandarin marmalade from her workmate. this freaks me out. this makes me think i need to tell the interweb less stuff about me. also, i wrote somewhere, i think on myspace that i was hungry for violent penetration and later thought better of this, but now i can't remember, or find where i wrote this and thus have been prevented from removing said, slightly, overly, intimate information about my sexual desire. eek. i hate the interweb.

vale valerie

for those of you in ignorance, two weeks ago I had three chickens. now I have two. and what happened in between? valerie died, that's what. and i apologise for not telling you sooner. I am so sorry and have been soundly admonished regarding this matter by shannon. valerie was a small stripy pullet, not quite point of lay and she was mark's favourite. Personally, i felt fairly ambivalent about her big yellow feet and legs but i did like her stripy feathers. I guess the most important thing you should know about Valerie is that she had pluck. she was a plucky little chicken who pulled through some hard times, specifically, the time her eyes were all swollen and weeping puss and i had to ride to lort smith with her in my pannier bags. poor little muffin was so sick she barely cared about having anti-biotics squirted down her throat. Then she grew stronger and started to object to the antibiotics but dan and i barely cared she was being a stroppy little so and so. we were just glad she was getting better. but not better enough. sadly, valerie's immune system must have been depleted because she developed a sniffle and woke up dead one morning. stiff and cold in the hay. the end.

a tyrant called oestrogen

perhaps it isn't oestrogen. perhaps it's a potent cocktail of hormones. whatever it is, i can't even begin to convey how distressed i am by this sensation of being an irrational woman. What do you do with an emotional state that you suffer but also analyse in light of years of hindsight earned after similar debilitating attacks of pre-menstrual angst? Does the knowledge that you're going to feel better in about four days make what you're feeling in the moment less 'real'? You know how they say not to grocery shop while you're hungry, should i try not to think anything at all about my personal relationships until after i bleed? Should i just write off anything that i think or feel in the next four days, looking forward to resuming sanity in the aftermath?

how (not?) to negotiate your love/sex/relationship-life

me: hey hot stuff, I have been terribly slack today so I have lots of study still to do... was going to ask you over otherwise but fear now that I will not be fun at all....

lover: hmmm... the not fun-ness of being too slack eh?

me: so why would i bother to message you such a strangely convoluted and ultimately negative statement!? um, i think i was wondering if you would like to come over for dinner anyway and maybe bring your book for when/if i need to read more law...

lover: ah i see...

me: oh, i really am an idiot aren't i!?

lover: no you really are terribly endearing with your negative contradictory urges
what happened to your date...if i may ask?

me: oh i was meant to have gotten back to her to confirm i think... but i didn't and she made other plans.

lover: oh. not playing keen enough eh?.... anyway, i reckon i'm gonna go home and do some cooking.. watch a video... but maybe i'll come over later?

me: mmm. yeah, i also said i'd be home tonight for a phone date with xxxx so I really am being rather silly. but um...

i mean, yes, you would be welcome to come over later but there's the fact of the phone date and i'm not sure when that was for... after soccer some time.

lover: hey you're really sending some clear signals here!

me: i know!!! why am i such a dork? I mean, i'd like to see you and i will probably not be busy studying if you come over later but there's the chance that xxxx will call. is that so complicated?

lover: mmm... no i think i can handle that. so if i go home... do what i need to do, see how i feel and then probably come over.. is that cool? and i mean coming over with the understanding that xxxx may call and i will get to read my book or something... !

me: yes, and that would be a well-negotiated evening i suppose.

lover: yes, a hilariously well negotiated evening.
ok i better do me some work. love ya spunk xxx

me: bye lover xxxxxx

Lover is busy. You may be interrupting.

*sniffle*

i fell off my bike. and took the scab off the knee that i grazed when i fell over at netball practice. and then i nearly fell over walking up the stairs at trades hall. maybe i have a brain tumour? and now I have mooched at home all day, moaning when i have to bend my knee and wiping the little crusty trail of liquid that keeps leaking down my leg. On the up side, the friendly lady at the chemist near Esther's was sweet and kind to me, which is exactly what i want in a chemist lady, and gave me those second skin dressing things. Which are soft and clear so I can watch my weeping, pulpy, bloody knee all day long. if i so desire. and i do.

Last night I was a disappointment to this great sporting nation. Despite staying up all night, with Mark and Dan in the lounge room watching the soccer, I elected instead to read 'Valencia', a novel set in leso mid 90s San Francisco. I started at 2am and finished about 5.30 am, with barely a toilet break. Wish I had that kind of stamina for reading about law. Not that surprising though, given how fascinatingly, hideously, hilariously, familiar the whole story and characters were. Drunk dykes making out and breaking up. Anti-capitalist queers decked out in ink and glitter.

Guess it was a bit more Sydney than Melbourne, but i was still seeing all my friends, lovers and ex-friends and lovers in that book. Maybe that was what kept my eyes glued to the pages, despite the ducted dry heat being a bit vicious on the eyeballs. It wasn't till half way that i think i admitted that I was trying to deduce some kind of encoded meaning and direction from the book, like it was some kind of parable. Does recognising derivative and repetitive patterns of behaviour, across time and people, count as any kind of epiphany? If so, it was a mixed bag kind of epiphany. Kind of nice to feel like other people have made even bigger fools of themselves, kind of depressing to realise you're repeating mistakes made by millions before you. I must stop looking for easy answers i think. particulary since i don't think there are any easy answers when you've already opted out of the kind of relationships that are sanctified by the mainstream. *earnest moment over* the other meaningful lesson i drew from Valencia is that i definitely need to take more drugs and that if i can do that, i will have more fun and be hotter.

the blues and me*

so I have begun to read Stone Butch Blues, which i am amazed and ashamed to admit I have never read before. What a tremendous book! I don't think i've ever described a book as 'tremendous' before, it's a bit of a weighty adjective. Shannon says that it changed her life but she only finished reading it last week so I don't feel like there's been that much of her life to change. Not that i doubt her word of course and she was talking about getting a three-piece suit but really, who doesn't want a three piece suit?

*yes, i may have alluded to this on Shannon's blog but I just wanted to confirm, last night, on a grammar website, i was led to believe that where we have been taught to say, for example, 'shannon and i are very cute on our matching red bicycles', it is more correct to say, 'Shannon and me are very cute on our matching red bicycles.' Can it be true? Oh Mark, why aren't you home to confer with me on this crucial issue!?

So is this the chest I want one day? I have been thinking about my body for a long time now, in an abstracted, slightly disassociated way. I think that I treat it like a doll-body and of course, that is my privilege. Not everyone has the shape of body that they can manipulate in the way that I do but at the same time, perhaps I would like to create something more from the flesh that I have?

I have been taking study breaks while I work on my take-home exam which involve a site called 'xxboys', where i got this photo. It's a photography project by a French transboy called, Kael. The blurbs by some of the boys are really progressive and simultaneously critique the project- the trans freak body as an erotic exotic... the relative absence of black faces/bodies. There are also a couple which discuss the process of becoming something feared, from whom little old ladies protect their handbag, a black man.

Mmm. and at the same time as I envy and perve on these bodies, a conversation I had with a friend a while ago, rattles around the back of mind. about infatuation with masculinity. about the way a trans identity might become another rejection of the beauty and the kinds of masculinity that inhabit the bodies of women. Wondering to what extent my desire to have my breasts removed derives from my discomfort with the parts of my body that jiggle and flop and fail to conform to taut, toned standards of beauty. But shouldn't it be a person's prerogative to tamper with the vehicle they're in, to modify and adorn? I'm just not that wrapped up in breasts, overlaid as they are with so much cultural baggage. milk machines, symbols of feminine mystique. Floppy symbols of my body becoming slow and heavy in adolescence. Off with them I say!

say no to me, i'm gagging for it.

well, because i haven't really told anyone that I'm writing this I figure I can confess something in the abstract. I am perverse, not just perverted. and when women say they're not going to sleep with me, it seems like that's when I really do become totally and utterly obsessed... with making them sleep with me of course.
------
and to think that i saved that gem above as a draft! In hindsight, I would like to say every word I typed is pure gold and absolutely true. In other news, also below the belt, I think I may have to begin the calendar-tracking of my bleeding in relation to libido. In fact, now I wonder if it was the rejection that turned me on, or was it about one month ago that I first started writing this!? Take note, all ye who would fuck me, many as you are, I'm sure- get me on the week beginning the 20th or thereabouts. (That last sentence is a grammatical nightmare!) But to return to my long-frustrated plan... the idea is to record the state of my libido on each little calendar square, perhaps with a little pictogram of my face? I fully expect a patten to emerge to confirm all my sneaking suspicions that, in fact I am just a disgusting biological mass of squirting bodily fluids, completely at the mercy of fluctuating hormonal levels. I'm a walking womb! Oh, I think I need to shower.

a debacle and a half

so i started this silliness because i wanted to post a comment on Tom Cho's blog. but now i doubt i can go back. perhaps i will overcome my shyness in a moment and think of something worthy of interweb fame... but right now i'm going to clean up the mess I made in the kitchen and try and pretend like i didn't just eat most of a cheap packet of little easter eggs... somebody said today, 'happy man on a stick day' and i liked that a lot.