Daydream Drivin'

Do you have an enduring daydream? One that gets you to sleep on the hardest nights, that fills the longest lines at the bank, through the ride on the crowded train, that pulls at your heart every time?

I want a red pick-up truck -- small, Toyota, standard transmission. I want it to grumble to life every morning after I crawl out of the back, where I keep my bedroll and my stash of books. I want to cradle a mug of coffee between my hands in a backwater diner, be asked where I'm headed and answer "Where the road leads me." I want to drive out of the closed New England valleys of my childhood to where the mountains are big and the sky is bigger. Where everything looks like this out my rearview mirror. I want to drive across the country by myself. I want to do by coming to each intersection and flipping a coin. I want to avoid highways and metropolitan areas, revel in the rural.

I lie down, trying to sleep, searching for something to soothe my crazy mind, and I come to this picture above all others. It's the freedom and the aloneness I crave, and also the exploration. It's my East-Coast-Manifest-Destiny-Neurosis. I first had it while I was still in high school and wanted out of that gray closed valley, and gray closed high school, more than I could describe to anyone, least of all my mother. Since then whenever my life feels like more than I can handle -- when commitments, relationships, and deadlines crowd my brain -- this is what I escape too. Someday I might actually get the balls to pick up and go -- but for now it's what gets me to sleep.

Ok, How does everyone feel about "Gertrude"?

Sisters, Quilts, and Self-Induced Angst

Tonight I finished the sqares for my sister's wedding quilt -- they are imperfect, beautiful, and done; there are still major design pieces that need to be worked out, but the squares are pieced and tomorrow I can start to size them and put them together, and have something to actually give the lovely women on their wedding day. If I can borrow my mother's digital camera you all might be able to see them, because really, I'm pretty proud.

But, of course, being me, I combined this process with a fair dose of emotional turmoil by watching Little Women while quilting. Other than the fact that we are only three sisters, and not four; that our mother was a single parent; no one has died of scarlet fever; and that it isn't the late nineteenth century -- I grew up in this book.

And it just *resonated* a little too fucking much tonight. Me and my handful of chocolate chips are going to bed!

Countdown to matrimony: 13 days (after midnight, damn, I need to go to bed)

New Name Contest

So, I'm going to get a new computer. I will probably order it this week, and the weekend of my sister's wedding my mother, who in this context can be referred to as TechGoddess, will transfer all the stuff from my old computer to my new computer.

My old computer is an Apple iBook that came out in the summer of 2001, and she served me well through my undergraduate days. But in this new day of dual platforms and wireless, and the possibility that at some point in the near future I will want to play with data on my computer -- it's time for an upgrade (with help from the last of my money from my maternal grandmother).

So, I'm taking suggestions for names for the new computer. Suggest things in the comments, at some point I might let people vote.

Some background and ground rules: My current computer is named Miriam, my flashdrive is Esperanza, and my iPod is named Stella (yes, I know this makes me sound *totally* nuts). It's important that the name not belong to anyone in my immediate aquaintance and not be a name that I would think about giving to a potential child or pet (I do give priority to things that *actually* emote -- they get different names). I don't have a gender preference. Also if it matters in your name considerations, I'm getting the new mid-grade white MacBook. Take a peek here.

Have at it!

Thursday if For Lists -- According to the Rules I've Just Made Up

1. You wouldn't think that adding five hours to your work week would make it that much longer -- but this week has been long, and I'm so ready for the weekend.
2. Sister Esq. is getting married in 16 days. That is two times eight. Four less than twenty, and two days and two weeks from now. HOLY SHIT. Let me be clear -- I love her partner and think she's fantastic, and the wedding itself will be fun and incredibly stressful, but the whole **idea** of it makes me.... I can't even describe the emotion - sad, nervous, anxious, overwhelmed... I just don't know.
   
3. I love going to workshop, right now writing there is the most exciting part of my life, and I have to admit that I don't know what to do with that, except feel vaguely guilty and relish it every week when I get to go.
4. Blueberry sorbet, walnuts, and a gingersnap = perfection.
5. Tonight a good friend of mine played me some of her songs on her guitar and I read her some of poems, and it was a swap that we were both nervous about, and had planned for months, and it was wonderful. We need to do that again sometime.
   
6. Today I was walking home from said friends house, enjoying the fact that I was wearing a cardigan, carrying produce fresh from her mother's garden, humming along to a song I'd just heard for the first time, and wishing that TP was going to be home when I got there. It's funny, but sometimes it's when we wouldn't be spending time together that I miss hir the most -- when I long for the ways that we would find independence and be each other's touchstones in a shared life.
7. This weekend I'm going to the beach which will give me an opportunity to wear my Wonder Woman bikini -- with it's bright red top and blue bottoms with white stars and red trim -- Yup, it makes me pretty happy.
   
8. I need to make sourdough this weekend to remind my starter that I love her.
9. I'm thinking about buying a new computer -- which means getting rid of my computer that I've had for six years. This makes me really excited and also a little nostalgic. This will mean needing to name a new computer -- this will be a big event.
10. It's midnight, I've only accomplished half of the tasks I set out for myself to do this evening, and I'm sleepy and I still definitely need to shower before bed.
    

back roads*

you kick up dust on the rutted road of my body.
i let you run over me, fast, like a kid in a pickup
music blaring. and i like it, your wheels rolling
hard, pushing me against the mattress, letting you
ride over me, but i will make you bottom out
'til your undercarriage shakes and trembles
for my top, my touch, 'til i flip your pickup, your wheels
spinning and the dust of this road licks
and curls around your screaming engine.


*because who doesn't need a (racy) poem on a Tuesday evening?


Also if you haven't read any good news lately, click on over to any of these places.
I also rescind MWMF related snarkiness, but am too lazy to edit, besides the sun is filtering through green, green leaves, and I might die if I don't go run around the pond RIGHT now.

That NYT Article that Everyone Keeps Talking About

So, there has been much hubbub in the last 24 hours about the NYTimes article [not linked because of that whole pesky TimesSelect thing] about transmen, that was in the Sunday Style section [because queerness is the new black], and how the lesbian and queer communities respond to their existence, both in intimate relationships and as a political issue. There has been hubbub in the blogosphere and there has been SO much hubbub on the "partners of transmen listserv" that I'm on.

My thoughts on the issue are as follows, first the things that were good about the article:

• That guy is hot. Shane -- the lawyer -- he's a hottie. Sure the pictures fetishize him a lot, but who could resist?
  
• It is good that these articles exist -- it isn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but it does get people thinking and I'm glad that they talked about the fact that the Census doesn't try to count transfolk, because people need to realize the ways that these statistical gaps affect people (but this is a side-point).
• Feministe has a very good write-up on this. Take a look, she says many things that I would say if I had time.

Here are my problems with it, from my citadel of privileged knowledge that I come across by loving and staking my life on a wonderful person who isn't a woman or a man and on a bi-weekly basis sticks hirself with a needle and shoots a powerful hormone into hir body.

• They conflate. I'm anti-conflation. Issue #1: the challenges faced by lesbians who are partnered with transmen before they transition and have to reconcile themselves with the transition or leave the relationship. Issue #2: the bizarre nationalistic concerns that lesbians have that their category is "emptying out"* and the ways in which they allow that to tear a community apart [see Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, and, oh right, any other place they get their panties in a knot]. Nationalism and balkanization don't work -- particularly when they are this petty and allow organizations to cut people off from the communities that nurture them and allow them to feel empowered enough to transition
• Issue#1 = Issue #2? -- Um, NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! You can be a lesbian who is not transphobic and still not be able to be with someone through a transition. I know that they didn't exactly, explicitly say these were the same -- but something about the rhetoric of it all got under my skin.
  
• 'Young women who call themselves "gender queer"' -- um, TP is genderqueer, and not a woman, many of the genderqueers I know are men, some are women, some are neither -- Please use terms with some subtlety and idea of what you are saying.
• Also, once and for all, sex IS NOT gender IS NOT sexual orientation!

Ok. I'm done.
*I think that Halberstam may have been taken out of context here, but I think that the phrase encapsulates many of the concerns.

[I apologize if this is snarky and off the cuff, all snarkiness is directed toward the NY Times Style section of the Sunday paper. No actual lesbians were harmed in the writing of this post]

Femme-and-inity

So, I've been meaning to write a post for a long time about femininity and femme identity. Tonight is the night for things that I've been meaning to do for a long time. I drove back from CoastalNewEngland today in the rain and gloom, in stop and go traffic. It is just so sad to be in first gear on the highway. I was up there for a wedding party, which was fun. I got home, and after about ten minutes tore my room apart because I realized that tonight was the night to polyurethane my bed, a task I've been putting off for six months. Then I got polyurethane all over my hands, and have spent the last two hours going to buy paint thinner (which meant getting back in my car which smells like dead cheese) and worrying about the toxicity of the things on my hands.

Finally, my roommate, B., told me to stop freaking out and to come eat her experimental stir-fry -- which was a good call since the last and only thing I'd had to eat was a v. good and bucolic diner breakfast with LOTS of coffee.

Ok. Down to business.

I think that one reason I've been putting off writing this series of posts on femme is that I think that so much of gender and gender identity is about performance and when I talk about this with people in my life it is in the context of my own performances, which you don't have access to, and so I worry that you'll get some warped view of me. Weirdness of the blogosphere.

So all of this started with Jackadandy's post and me saying that it got me thinking and also reading Katia's interview with Elizabeth Stark. So, if you want background reading for this start there.

In high school I would wear a skirt one day and three piece suit the next. I loved the double takes that I got from people. I still really enjoy the ways in which my gender performance counters expectations -- no one expects me to be smart and sexy, or butch and an economist, and I like being able to push back against people's expectations of me, or of women in general. My sisters are both fairly feminine -- Sister Esq. is pretty urban hipster, funky attorney feminine, and Sister M.D. is more posh and put together. Both of them put significant pressure on me in my teens to be more femme, and it's a blessing that I've never tried to compete with them on the femme-front, because for the most part it still feels like a tune I'm supposed to be dancing to, and find kind of catchy, but can only sort of hum along to when I'm not too distracted.
It's a role that I enjoy, and yet, in part because I don't really commit to it -- I always feel vaguely like a failure, or like a small child wearing her mother's makeup. I don't (and have never) shaved my legs, I invariably screw up my makeup or laugh too hard or my hair is crazy or something, something is wrong with my femme performance.

Which is why I found the following Stark quote so fascinating (stolen from Jackadandy):

"Femmes know how to make love to other women, to butches, to transmen. In my opinion, this is an art and should not be overlooked. Femmes know how to fail and succeed at femininity at the same time. We use our flaws, our fat, our hairiness, our loud mouths, our oversized brains and our excessive accessorizing to celebrate ourselves and those we love and to foment revolution."

To know how to "fail and succeed" at something simultaneously. This sounds like fun. I think it is also the failures and fractures within femme that lend it some of its queerness and I think that this is particularly attractive to me. One of my main problems with being mainstream feminine is that I end up feeling like my queerness is not recognized by the outside world and I want people to have to reconcile me with the me they think they see.

I also love the powerful sexual imagery of femme. The way that she has power over her lover and with her lover and the acknowledgement within queer communities of the art of femme lovemaking. When I wear a dress and walk around with TP, it is this power that I'm tapping into and bathing in. To identify as femme is also one of the only ways to identify oneself as desiring butches and transmen and to extent that gender identity/performance is all about performing desire, well it's in my best interests to be femme. I also love the ways I'm desired, the particular escutcheons and performances of desire, when I'm femme and the person desiring me is playing with some version of masculinity.

Chris (of Jackadandy, who I sometimes, probably incorrectly, call Jack) in hys post also noted however, the differences between role, identity, and label. In general, I agree with hys analysis. I would add however that the slippage between identity and label is very significant and happens quickly. It is far to easy for things that one identifies with to become "citadels of limitation", and I'm anti-that so I've also been reluctant to take on the identity of femme. On the other hand, I recognize that it is an identity and don't want to trivialize it by calling it a "role" that I take on from time to time. I'm also not entirely ready to never be able to able to identify as butch. Here are some ways that I am butch:

• I can and like to fix things.
  
• I love men's clothes, on me, and on others.
  
• I can open jars that are hard to open.
• I have broad shoulders, lift weights, and love my body best when it's jacked.
  
• I am a sometimes top, with a desire to unlock the pleasures and desires of my sexual partners.
  

So, I have no idea where this leaves me. Except that maybe I should go back to my high school ways, where I was either femme or butch and stayed away from middle ground. Of course the middle ground is also a pretty comfortable place at this point. In the end, I don't know what I'm wearing when I'm not in drag. The problem with this scenario is that it runs me smack dab into that "role" problem. My gender performance is, for me, a series of roles, but it also plays with other people's identities, and I don't want to "play butch" or "play femme" because that seems to undermine folks who identify with that. I think I mainly undermine that by being able to avoid the hard parts of butchness or femme identity because it's not what I'm doing full time.

I know that this is long and I've rambled horribly, and if you've read this far I'm impressed. Now, I'm tired and this might be the first in a series and I'll be able to hash this out some more - hopefully with questions/thoughts from y'all so I don't get lost in my own head.

Queer Books For Queer Kids

Ok, kids. Here's the deal. There is a homeless shelter for LGBTQI [henceforth queer] youth in HarborCity, thing is they don't have a library that reflects this at all. So, in response, some folks from QueerOpenMic and the Workshop are collecting books to donate to their library (and potentially donate to other like-minded shelters nationwide).

Growing up queer is hard enough, growing up queer and homeless -- well, I can't write about that, I'm too blessed to be able to imagine it fully. But if you have any books, 'zines, movies, chapbooks ETC. that are lying around your abode that you aren't still reading/watching-- please consider sending them.

How do you send them?

Well, first you email me at corinneblogger@gmail.com. Then I perform some test wherein I determine whether you are an ax murderer and in which I ask you to protect my pseudonymity (sp?) -- then I email you my snail mail address and you mail them to me. I know that postage is expensive, but hey, they created media mail for a reason.

Think about it.

Oh, and the only guideline is that you can't send anything that is explicitly and solely erotica.

(Now, if you want to just send that to me, I'm not saying I wouldn't be grateful).

Life in the Passing Lane

For some reason, for the last month, life has been swamping me. I would say that it's been life in the fast lane, but really it's been more like trying to drive a car you've never driven before in rush hour traffic where everyone is going somewhere in a huge hurry, but moving pretty slowly, and you have to keep looking around into mirrors and blind spots to make sure that you aren't fucking up royally, or denting anyone's fender.

Tonight I have a reprieve: Sister, M.D. called to cancel our dinner date; Roomie L. is at her family's house on the gorgeous New England Coast; and Roomie B. is playing frisbee. So, I'm home -- drinking a beer, listening to Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer, doing laundry, treating the **new** wooden countertop, and blogging for the first time in an age.

NewJob is going well. I like the people I'm working for and even more I like having work that I like. I spend a lot of time thinking about graduate school, where I'll go and what I'll do. But really, I'm not applying until next fall (so matriculating in Fall 2008) and so for now I can enjoy having a job that I want to go to about 90% of the time. And for a 45 minute commute that's a pretty good percentage.

One of the major positive externalities to me of the job is that I'm thinking again -- thinking about future projects I want to do, thinking about things I want to explore, critiquing other people's work, etc, etc.. In this vein, I had coffee with my former thesis advisor and friend this afternoon. She just moved to HarborCity, and I'm overjoyed that she's here -- she's smart and supportive, and knows my econ-academic brain better than anyone else in the whole wide world.

I wrote a hard piece about AbusiveCollegeGirlfriend (henceforth ACG) in writing workshop a couple of weeks ago and last week at Queer OpenMic I performed it. I don't think that I was fully aware of the impact that that would have on me. I felt like I was bearing witness to my own pain and anger in ways that I never had before and telling the truth in very basic ways that also felt like I hadn't before. As I was nervously gearing up to read, I talked to the guy who runs the workshop A., and he was saying that I just needed to be prepared for people
to be sympathetic, and said that I could always say that it was a work of fiction, and I realized in that moment how much it *wasn't* and *couldn't* be a work of fiction in their eyes. Also, for the first time, I had friends at the Queer Open Mic and went out with them afterwards, and hung out with a different set of them beforehand. It was awesome, and new and felt so right and so queer I can't even describe it.

In the past ten days I've also cut about 8 inches of hair off my ponytail and "revised" my bangs several times.

That is the update from my life. I'll blog more soon, maybe, no promises, I swear I'm more reliable in real life than I am here.