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.
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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.