Whenever I entered a new phase of my life, I would always spend a few days or weeks wandering around in a sort of semi-daze. I wanted people to treat the changes I had made as if they were normal, and yet at the same time I wanted to celebrate them and revel in how they made me feel. When I came out the first time as gay, when I came out later as transexual, when I left my ex, when I found Hare and rediscovered Bear, all of these things I wanted to just be normal and yet I myself have been guilty of calling too much attention to them.

So it is now, again.

Jessie and I got married last night. I am now legally "Kristina Robin Tracer" should I choose to be, and I do. I find myself wanting to talk about this with people, to celebrate my legal commitment to my mate, and to have people know how happy i am that our relationship how has the proper recognition that it should have had so long ago.

What, though, has really changed?

I still have work on Monday. Jessie has work this afternoon. I ordered a pizza for breakfast, and tomorrow I'm going to sleep late and then bake cookies. Maybe I'll bake cookies today, or play Silent Hill 3 some more. Really, nothing at ay day-to-day level has changed, and yet I feel this urge to make things different, even though there's no need.

I do have to say here, though, that the ceremony was TEH COOLEST EVAR. Our friend Bennie ministered, while SusanDeer served as maid of honor and witness. Bennie noted that nothing in our relationship had ever come easy, and so we had to work for our wedding, too. We were then handed the dice and made to fill in the bottom half of Yahtzee score sheet (except the Yahtzee and Chance bits) in order to earn the bits of the ceremony.

I beat Jessie by forty points, too, which figures. I end up doing most of the work in the relationship anyway. =n.n=

---

It occurs to me that I said while I was in Thailand that I will have "burned the bridge" when I had my surgery. In truth, that was an erroneous statement. I'm the same person that I was before then as after, at least in terms of continuity of existence and memory. To say that a singular event, even one as dramatic as that, would change my life is silly. It didn't even effect which bathroom I used, even if one of my old companies wanted to work things that way. 

A lot has changed since then, though. I've changed jobs twice, been unemployed for four months, gotten married, served as a staff member of a major furry con twice, and started making plans for a permanent future that I never thought I would make when I was younger. I've become someone that I'm happy to be, even if some of the details still aren't right and others can never be fixed. I may forever be on the bridge, crossing from one truth to another, one vision to another, but I think there are far more apt metaphors for my life than one of transition.

I am in serious need of a site redesign.

I should know better than to play with memes. I really should. However, this one seems relatively harmless, and there's something quirkily amusing to me in the act of being asked potentially intimate questions by someone I don't know well. It's kind of like a cross between Catholic confession and Craig Kilborn's Five Questions, with a dose of "Jeopardy Home Edition" thrown into the mix.

I prefer to think of it as Interviewing the Martian.

The rules of the game, as conveyed to me:

1. Leave a comment saying you want to be interviewed.
2. I'll reply and give you five questions to answer.
3. You'll update your diary with the five questions answered.
4. You'll include this explanation.
5. You ask other people five questions when they want to be interviewed.

---

You and I have met a handful of times and talked a bit more than that on IRC. What is something I wouldn't know about you, either from our conversations or those I've had with [Jessie]?

I have a secret passion for swing and gangster chic.

I can't even call it an interest in swing music. I mean the whole thing. From Big Band up to ska, I love the sound. I love the clothes. I miss the Rat Pack, even if I was never a fan of the movies. "Some Like It Hot" is still one of my favorite films. Long before my transition, I had a group of friends with whom I would regularly meet for martinis, coffee, cigars and poker. We would put on CDs, records, tapes, whatever media we had of the music of the day, loosen our ties from work, and kick back a few drinks and deal away the night.

At one time, we had plans to start the Gangster Swing Bowling Team. There would be five of us, in matching custom tailored zoots and clear acrylic bowling balls with our personal emblems inside. Mitch was The Knife, with a pair of shivs in his ball and a blood red zoot. Joe was The Dealer, with a bright purple zoot and the Ace and Jack of spades flashing blackjack on the lanes. Ben, in white, was The Crack and had a spare derringer in his bag as well as his ball. Bobby got green, and played The Fish, our resident
wiseguy. I, of course, was The Lug, with a leather sap and a black zoot as the enforcer.

We were even pricing out embroidered shirts at one point.

I look back at the antics of my youth now and I laugh. I can't fit that image into my head as "me" any more, but at the same time I quietly miss the character that I played at that time in my life. Trying to do now what I did then just feels alien, and yet I still miss the part. It feels a bit like I've lost the ability to play a favored role in a play, and I'll forever envy the person who's stepped in to fill the part, even though I can't or won't.

What has been the most unexpectedly rewarding part of your transition?

The first time I passed without effort, without dressing, without trying. The moment at which someone says "ma'am" while you're sporting three days' of facial growth and wearing a button-down shirt with a tie and a pair of ill-fitting jeans, because you're carrying a purse and you have the body language and mannerisms of a woman. The moment you realize you can Be Anything, if only you allow yourself to be.

There is no gender anywhere. We are all absolutely free.

How did you come to choose your current name?

My mother loves Winnie the Pooh.

She loves the stories so much, in fact, that when I was originally born she wanted to name me Christopher Robin. She sold my father on the Christopher part, but Robin he just couldn't handle.

His exact response was, according to Mom, "That's a fag's name."

When it came time for me to pick my new name, I went back to this. Robin makes a perfectly good female name as well as a male one, and so I used it. I consider it the same sort of nod that other trannies who use their mother's maiden names make.

Far more interesting than my first name, though, is my last. Davis wasn't the surname with which I came into the world, but I knew that I wanted to get rid of the one I got from my parents. Both of my parents have systematically broken every tie to their extended families that they could, and so in truth I really had no heritage on which to draw. I barely know any of my cousins or anyone else past my parents, and so there was no reason to keep my last name as proof of any sort of connection. For all of thirty seconds I considered the last name of Taggart before dismissing it out of hand. I didn't want to forever be known as someone trying to copy someone else.

At one point, I wrote a story as a sign of solidarity between myself and someone now somewhat estranged from me. When she transitioned, she took her middle name from the character in the story that represented her. A bit later, I wrote another story, not currently available, with a character named Theresa Davis, a wisecracking wannabe Objectivist and architecture student with a chip on her shoulder from being raised in an excessively Southern antebellum family, the sort of people who would make a public show of solidarity with their wayward daughter, then pack her off to the remotest end of the planet with a hefty stipend on the
condition that she not come home to embarrass them further.

Her last name became mine when I realized just how much of her was my own past, or what I felt my past had been. I can now only hope that her future is as bright as my present.

Where do you see yourself in seven years?

Gawrsh. I have a hard enough time seeing myself in a year. I'd like to think that by then Jessie will have made an honest woman of me, but only in the sense that I'll be writing kiss-and-tell columns for weekly tabloids. A house, a nicer car, a raise, out of credit card debt hell, a good start towards a retirement fund. The little things in life that make worrying about the future not such a whitefaced terror. 

You and [Jessie] run off like bandits into the night. Who takes care of your server(s)?

Positing that I could afford to run off like a bandit into the night suggests having enough money to afford a cellular modem or satellite uplink for the penguin, or else transferring it to a colo station and monitoring it from the open road via the same means. More practically, I'd need to find a good home for it, preferably with one person to handle server admin and another to do the actual schmoozing with the users, 'cause Crom knows I can't do it worth a damn. Joanne would make a passable stand-in for me, but Kelly would have to be Jessie's replacement. She has the right blend of apathy, sadism and optimistic innocence.

Names hold an awesome power.

I have this borderline-unhealthy fascination with names. "The name in itself is the thing in itself." Knowing the true name of someone or something, especially if it's important or meaningful in my life, gives me an emotional boost I can't define or explain in any logical capacity. To know the birthnames of my friends, to be able to say Yoshua ben Yosef instead of Jesus Christ, to refer to Samuel Clemens and Marion Morrison, these are
my weapons.

There is an intimacy in knowing the true name of a person. It's a level of assumed familiarity that can't be had in any other way. It's an unnatural one, too, for all that I hate that word. It doesn't actually guarantee any knowledge about a person, or any understanding, but it implies a great deal of both to the casual listener and it's almost always either an off-putting insult or a self-written invitation to company for those who do. Either way, though, it throws the other person just a little off balance. 

Almost everyone I know ends up with some kind of nickname. That may just be human nature, but I almost never use anyone's full name unless I'm feeling passionate about something. Angry, scared or intimate, but there's a level
of emotion I have to feel before I'll use someone's full name. If I'm really put out, I'll use an older variant of someone's name. If I want someone's attention, I'll use a middle name. My safeword in scene is almost always
my top's middle name.

Someone once very dear to me once threatened to call me Robin as my given name. I jokingly said I would call her by her middle name in response. In truth, I was secretly thrilled at the intimacy implied by the casual use
of my middle name like that. I took to calling her not just Angela but Anji, spelled like the Simon and Garfunkel song. I gave her the name, after all. At least, she took it from something I wrote.

I call her by her first name now. Maybe one day I'll call her Anji again.

---

Today started off as TEH SU><0r, but over the course of the day it's actually become rather decent. Last night I had another one of those grand emotionally purgative events that happens when some painful truth about oneself comes to light in a way that one isn't really prepared to except but can no longer avoid. Relaying the whole story doesn't seem productive in hindsight, but the nuts and bolts of it is that I still have a lot of outstanding issues with my appearance, and so I end up spending a lot of time befriending people who're transitioning and unsure of themselves so that we all become a sort of mutual-support society, nobody really believing that zie's okay, but everyone believing everyone else is doing good and gaining confidence in zirself by belonging. It sounds very shallow, and it probably is, but I still do it and I think I've known I've done it for ages even if I haven't really been aware of why I did it. Last night, I admitted the why to myself and to Jessie, and it really upset me.

After an extended period of intermittant crying, I crashed in Jessie's arms and had a dream wherein there was a bunny, and a scientist. The scientist would show the bunny pictures of things like clouds and rainbows and stars
with smiley faces on them and ice cream cones and other happy things, and then whenever the bunny would hop up and down and lift her ears to show she was happy, the scientist would stick the bunny with a needle. After some amount of time doing this, whenever the scientist held up any picture at all, the bunny would go hide in the corner of her cage and whine and shake and shiver, no matter what was in the picture.

This did not leave me in a good mood this morning.

I started the dey with a phone call from the guy whose car I rear-ended, and he wants me to pay $700 for the repairs to his Acura. Now, I said when I left the scene that I would pay for any repairs, but I don't consider fixing
cosmetic damage to be "repairs", no matter how expensive the car may be. He admitted on the phone that there was nothing keeping his car from being roadworthy, but apparently he's also had the repair work done and now
he expects me to pay for it. I told him on the phone that if sent me a bill I'd reimburse him, but now I'm having second thoughts. He was the second driver named in the accident report, but he wasn't the one who was driving
when the accident occured. He wants me to pay for what amounts to a cosmetic patch on his bumper and a fresh coat of paint, and while I probably would be willing to drop $200 on the matter, $700 is a little much in my opinion for what he himself says is nothing but a matter of appearance.

After that literal rude awakening, I got a healthy dose of crow and humble pie from the events of the night before, and the dream really left me shaken. So, it took me a while to even want to get out of bed and figure out what I wanted to do with myself during the day. Jessie had to work, and we're both tired of spending ridiculous amounts of money going out to eat when I know how to cook and I have all this time on the weekend when Jessie's not home to do so, so I finally said I'd go to the store and pick up supplies for a few things to cook over the weekend that would last Jessie through lunch and both of us for dinner through the rest of the week, with the plan to go next Saturday to the store again for more groceries.

I wish I could've walked over to the Clemens near the apartment complex, but it was just too damn hot, so I ended up driving over there after taking Jessie to work. I bought another three canvas bags, which ran me just over twelve dollars but which will save me fifteen cents per purchase more every time I go shopping there. I'll have to inquire at Giant and Redner's how much they give for their bag reuse policy, too. It might benefit me to keep one in the car at all times just in case.

I picked up the ingredients for jambalaya, steak cobbler, chili and almond toffee cookies, then came back to the house, whereupon I discovered a dilemma: what's the best method of properly organizing these recipes in the database I decided I wanted to build.

Yes, sadly I cannot escape my geekery even on the weekends.

Putting all of the ingredients in one table along with the customary measurements is easy enough, but when it comes to building the actual recipes, I suddenly have an issue. I know how to make a number of varieties of certain dishes, depending on what meats and veggies I use. Meat Cobbler is the best example of this. I can make it with steak, mushrooms and onions. I can make it with chicken, mushrooms and peas. I can make it with beef
gravy. I can make it with chicken gravy. I can make it with cream gravy. Basically, I have a "meat and veggies" "super-ingredient," a "gravy" "super-ingredient", and then the crust. So, do I make a third table of "super-ingredients" for things that get reused regularly, or do I just make multiple versions of the main recipe with an
excess of redundant information?

It's hard to believe, but worrying about this has actually lightened my mood considerably, as well as made me concerned at just how much of a geek I really am. =n.n=