She only sees what she wants to see

I find it somewhere between vaguely amusing and hair-rippingly infuriating the things my grandmother sees and says about my appearance.

For years she has nagged me -SO kindly, of course, you almost can't say anything because she's so well-meaning...- about my glasses. My black, rectangle-frame glasses, that look just like the ones before. "They hide your pretty eyes," she says, "You look like you're hiding behind them." She thinks I should get other glasses or contacts. No. They make it easier to communicate without words, they fit well enough, they match everything in my fairly utilitarian wardrobe, and provide me with adequate peripheral vision. And contacts dry my eyes out like mad.

My grandmother dislikes the way I have from time to time kept my hair in the past, short butch cuts that I used at school to swing around the gender-variant scale. I have had to pass these off as the result of a "$10 haircut," not a stylist who did just what I wanted, in order to keep myself in the closet to that half of the family. I finally have long hair again, and she commented this past weekend that I looked "So much better with your hair long, dear."

One of the main benefits of long hair is that it provides a veil, a shield to hide behind when I need it.

I want to scream.

In other scream-related news, Le Batard called me. I was not ready for this. I don't remember if I mentioned this here, but the last interaction we had before we left did not go well. Basically, he was an utterly insensitive, probably a manipulative jerk, did not pay attention to specific things I spent a long time explaining, and attempted to go against my wishes on a few counts. We had not spoken from before Sept. until yesterday, and I'm still not sure how to talk to him. I'm shaking and angry, even angrier after talking to my Dad last night pointed out a few more points where he'd been a jerk and I'd been too gracious to title it so at the time. Monkey and I are going to talk to him on Boxing Day, and I'm not sure how this will turn out. I don't know exactly how I want it to turn out. I wish he'd grow up and stop using people.

Wish us luck bashing his head in.

(metaphorically, of course.)

I'm also running at odds with my gender again, but not much I can do about that right now. 4 days of forced femininity have really warped my cycle of fluctuating gender ID & presentation. Whenever I've done this "forcing" before, it's rather fucked up my system, hormonally, but that's probably also due to the stress inherent in such exercises. I hope that a few days to settle down and let myself be 'male' or 'female' at will will reset me.

~Brill

They Keep Telling Me I'm an Adult, But I Don't Believe Them

My twentieth birthday was last week. I am no longer a teenager.
Whee?
I feel like I'm growing out of the house; I've already decided I'm staying at College next summer and working as a counselor at the summer arts program they run for kids. I would have this summer, but chickened out/procrastinated (shocker, I know) and didn't get the application in on time. I won't be able to do the house-sitting for my Psych teacher as I have for the past 3 years, but the money and the DISTANCE and the autonomy are all greater at school.

I got very happy-inducing gifts: money from the grands, which will almost exclusively go to things of which they would not approve, but which I will couch in neutral terms in letters. GLBT fiction and non-fiction become "books," and the corset I have been planning for for a year is "clothing."
My Mum, wonderful creature, got me 2 farcical ("Farcical aquatic ceremony!") comedies: Galaxy Quest and Dogma ("Outdated imperialist dogma!"...I do love the peasant). It is absolute coincidence that Alan Rickman stars in both of these. Total coincidence. Happiest pf all, I now have my own Heather Alexander CD! I'm vaguely embarrassed of the noise I made when I opened it... but only vaguely. Dad didn't need those eardrums anyway.

**Spoiler alert ahead for Dies the Fire series**

I've finished the Dies the Fire trilogy, and now wish to hunt down S.M. Stirling and beat him about the head and shoulders for ending the books with a bloody funeral, wedding, and ominous vision. Seriously, there are too many loose ends! What's the next book/trilogy in the series? Grah!

**End Spoilers**

This past week I sat in at a counseling office as a stand-in receptionist/gopher/paperwork minion. It was interesting, enlightening, and slightly bewildering.
(The fax machine is an evil, evil creature, and We do not understand its devious ways. In fact, We think that it it took a long walk out a close window, the world would be a better place. But that's just Our opinion.)
Paperwork is much easier.

I've made mention of doing a post that delves into my internal gender issues, and I will. Just not today, and not until I have a much longer stretch of free time, and less S.M. Stirling eminently on the brain.

Laters.
~Brill