When I was younger, I used to think that the friendships I made in high school would last forever. I had moved from one city to another, and in so doing I had kept all of the friends I had made in Dallas and made a whole new
set in Austin, and some had even migrated with me. A lot of my high school friends went to the same college I did, and I ended up rooming with one of them. It seemed then as if the connections I had made in my life were
permanent.

It's strange how people drift apart. I think part of what keeps people together is repetition of contact, and when that disappears people start to fade. Happy memories once so sharp and lcear become faded and greyed, leaving
only a positive sensation at the mention of an old name. Flames of friendship have grown cold by age and neglect, reduced to dimly glowing embers, some gone out entirely.

I remember with shock being in grad school at UNT, and running into a high school friend who'd gone to Baylor when I went down for an ACM programming competition. He'd risen from constantly having to ask me how to solve problems to helping proctor the region's hardest coding comp. It was only the passing shock of recognition, but we managed to exchange about a dozen words. I didn't know what to say. We were never close, but we had always been on good terms, and then one day he was gone, off to a different school. When we saw each other again, it was like a physical blow, a memory that begged for attention that I simply couldn't address because of the artificial constraints of time and protocol. It felt very disconcerting.

I remember ending my relationship with The Ex and trying to go back to pick up a friendship with one of my oldest and longest friends, the first to whom I ever extended the title of brother. Things never really did work out from that point; those six years I had been in the relationship we had hardly spoken with each other—such is the power of emotional abuse—and other issues came up in the meantime that tested our ability to rebuild what
we had lost. Seventeen years came to a close in 2001, and I still haven't really recovered.

I've been spending a lot of time lately missing the tabletop gaming days of college down in Austin, of my roommates then and the marathon sessions we would run. I found one of them some time ago; he's living in DC now, married and a permanent resident if not a citizen, if I remember right. I never managed to stay in touch. That one was my fault, and I still feel poorly about it. I keep saying "I should email him again," and then I never do.

All these things have been heavy in my mind lately. I had to let go of someone else in my mind recently. To reference That Damned Book, it had come to feel as if I had had to amputate a limb when the friendship went bad. I didn't want to do it, but it was watch it fester and pray it would heal, or admit I couldn't save it and get rid of it before it cost me anything else. The switch from one state to another always leaves me melancholy. I never
feel afterwards as if I've done enough to salvage my relationships, and yet looking back at them I can never figure out what I would've or should've done differently.

Letting go is never easy for me. There's something in my mind, and I can't tell what it is, that doesn't let me "pick up where we left off". Going through the routine of trying to salvage a dying friendship usually costs me whatever trust I had for a person, and that's something that once gone is even harder to get back than it was to build the first time; there's always the lingering memory of having been "betrayed" once before. Not every friendship I've lost has been because of that, mind you. Some I've just had to end because of moving or distance. The ones that I had to end for my own sanity's sake, though, are usually gone for good.

I don't like this in myself, but I think this is just another part of Hare to me. I must feel Safe. The people who have changed and become Unsafe in my mind, they must somehow show me that they are Safe again, and I must be able to believe it. I know from experience that it is possible to recapture it; I've managed with at least two people before. I absolutely had to have them away from me, and then when they were gone I found myself missing them and back. It's possible. It's just very hard.

If it were something so simple as assigning a value to each person, Safe or Unsafe, that would be easy. The truth is never so simple. There are degrees of Safety, and I can't say casually or with any certainty where someone stands on the rankings in my head. I only know when someone has transitioned to Unsafe, by which point it's almost certainly too late for me to fix. To bring someone back from Unsafe, I must actively try to be around that person, and doing that means Danger, which makes any honest evaluation of the person in question difficult.

The real problem with all this is that the people I've lost because they've become Unsafe in my head tend to be cast in a negative light when it's not warranted. I see the worst in people that I've written off in this fashion, as a justification for why I removed them from my life. "He was abusive." "She was crazy." "He was clingy." I end up
focusing on all the bad points, however negligible, and forgetting about the good ones no matter how great.

I'm not sure I had a point to all of this, really, but I've been in a heavily introspective mood of late. The backup node to our network vanished thanks to a burgeoning personality conflict, and a comment made at one point about being "just another person Kristy's left behind" has made me wonder about all the people no longer part of my life.

I'd be lying if I said I didn't miss them. I'd be lying if I said I wanted them all back.

I've been joking for a long time that this year's birthday was going to be my last. I remember hearing a lot of jokes growing up about women who just stopped counting their ages after 29 and started counting years of experience instead. It feels a bit weird, to be staring thirty in the face. I realized much to my horror that a third of my life was now officially behind me, and that thought scares me like few ideas can. The Moody Blues once lamented in a song, "It's not a lot / It's all you've got / Twenty-two Thousand Days." Have I really seen that many sunrises?

I think the fact that this is the first thought that comes to mind on having a birthday last Saturday shows just how afraid of death I really am. This is still a source of surreal amusement to me, even as I lay awake at night shivering and wishing for the dawn. In my past, when I professed to atheism and hated my life, death held no fear for me. Now that I'm not so sure what I believe, I find myself plagued with thoughts of what Death is, and what being dead is like, if anything. Now that I love my life, I'm afraid of its end.

Birthdays, however, should be a source of celebration, not of mourning. They should be a mark of rememberence and recognition for a person, honoring zim and reminding zim of the importance of that person in one's life. If Thanksgiving is my holiday of choice on a grand scale, then birthdays are the individual complement thereto.
They're a chance to give that kind of recognition to the individuals that are important in one's life.

Pity I couldn't stop panicking about mine.

Now, to be utterly fair, it's my own fault. I totally forgot Jessie's birthday this year. I even forgot the day I normally think is Jessie's birthday but isn't. It wasn't until two or three days after that that Jessie reminded me it had gone past, and I felt utterly horrible for days afterwards. It's still embarrassing to me, to not celebrate a day so important to me.

This, however, set me up to thinking that Jessie would forget mine. Zir memory is notoriously bad for things like dates and times, which is why zie has the Visor in the first place. I don't normally go out of my way to make a big deal of my own birthday 'cause I'm not good at making a fuss over myself, despite my ego. So, I had done nothing to really advertize that it was impending, and Jessie had also said nothing in the days before, so I really didn't know if zie knew or not.

The day before, when Bennie dropped me off at his place so I could pick up my car after work, I noticed a number of cars in his yard and asked if he had something going on over the weekend. He mentioned that a number of people were visiting, and so in my little mental ledger I struck his and Sue's names off of the list of available people, and since I knew Kelly was working and everyone else has headed out of state again, I got it into my head that anything birthday-related would be Jessie and I doing something special together.

Jessie gave absolutely no indication whatsoever of having remembered.

Saturday morning, I get up and say "I need to go to the bank" and there's some discussion as to whether or not Jessie wants to come with or stay home and do laundry. The only catch is that we have no quarters to do laundry, and Jessie says zie wants to go to the laundromat. I say we can go to the bank and get quarters there, and Jessie half-heartedly agrees and then plots down on the couch in typical cat-fashion and lazes about online while I spod in front of .hack for a few hours. Jessie makes no suggestion of later plans.

At 15h00, I make Jessie get dressed and come with me to the bank. I bank with Navy Federal Credit Union, so
my branch is on a naval base, and the new CO has decided to confiscate all the standing base passes and require everyone who doesn't live on base to get day passes every time. This eats up an extra fifteen minutes while I rummage in the glove box for my registration and fill out the added paperwork to get onto the base so I can deposit my paycheck. The base pass has, in bright green numbers and letters, the date, which is of course my
birthday. Jessie says nothing about this, but I don't ask because I'm not going to push the matter.

We get the quarters, but on the way home I realize we have nothing in the house to cook and so I say we need to divert to Sam's Club on the way to get supplies for the week, and Jessie looks a bit irritated and says we really need to get home to do laundry 'cause zie's got no clothes for work tomorrow, but I persevere and get what I need, then start heading home. Jessie says in the car that zie should call Mom when we get in, but that's
about it.

On the way home, I ask if we have any plans for dinner. Jessie shrugs non-committally and suggests we wait a while adn asks me if I'm hungry. I say that I'm starting to get there and suggest that if Jessie can't think of anything to do I'm going to cook alfredo. Jessie asks me to hold off for a while 'cause it's not dinnertime yet.

Finally, I can't stand it and I say, "You know, today was my birthday." All day I've been growing antsier by the moment 'cause the only people that remembered were my parents who sent me an e-mail (Thanks, Dad!). I was afraid if I waited until the day after to say anything I would be too upset to say it reasonably, but I also felt miserable at bringing it up in the first place 'cause it didn't seem like my place to remind other people of that kind of thing. If they remembered and wanted to do something for it, great. If they didn't, it wasn't my place to ask
or demand it.

Jessie's reponse was, "You broke a lot faster than I thought you would."

As it turned out, Jessie had in fact been setting something up for the last two weeks and had been trying to out-laze me and get me to go off on these errands by myself so that zie could pick up my birthday present, but I had been supremely uncooperative and refused to go alone. Further, I had not given Jessie the time to call Bennie and Sue and let them know when we would be going to dinner, 'cause Jessie had invited them to join us and they had accepted. So, Jessie let the whole charade drop, making me feel like a total doofus for all of about thirty seconds until I could laugh at the whole affair.

Dinner was wonderful. It's always good to go to the Outback, but this time was special: Bennie told the waitress it was my birthday, and they served me a twelve-ounce prime rib with a candle in it. I got really embarrassed and flustered, but I really did enjoy it. Then we went to Borders and Jessie got me my gift, a copy of Alice in Wonderland to read to me at night so zie can practice zir voice at home and not feel silly talking to zirself like I
do. *grin*

Thank you all again.

Today, I spent the day refactoring FormBot. I actually started analyzing what I would need to do yesterday, but I didn't touch any of the code yesterday. I started this morning shortly after I got to work, and I finished some time around 15h00. In the middle, I finished up a project at work and got a second out the door that evening (after 21h00, three hours after I wanted to leave), so I don't feel so bad about working on it while in the office.

It's strange just how jazzed I am about this. Normally, code is a living for me, but rarely is it a hobby. This, though, really has me psyched. I've been able to take what I've learned in the last few months working at HMS and I've successfully applied them to my own code base. I refactored out huge swatches of code into two modules, moved a third, shrunk the main program down to a driver, added some spiffies to shrink out some wasted code, and generally rearched over half the program. In a day. And it works.

That's the part that really gets to me about this whole affair. It works. I half feared that I would change around something at one point and break the whole mess, so I didn't even edit the code in place. I made backup copies
of everything, then edited those instead. As it turned out, I had no need of them. As soon as I got all of the syntax errors out of the way, the code ran without a hitch. I'm actually getting better at what I do.

I've even helped Bennie at work modify and improve one of the modules he's planning to check into CPAN. It doesn't sound like much, but it's the sort of little step that really has me excited. I've contributed to source that may well be used by more people than just me. I've made improvements to code bases at work that have become part of the generally accepted toolset and part of the development cycle.

I guess I always felt at my previous jobs that whatever code I contributed lasted the length of whatever project I had, and never seemed to go anywhere. Now I'm actually improving my skills, adding new features to useful things that people are actively using. I've gotten to the point that a massive rearchitecture and reeingineering takes me six hours, and the whole time I'm enjoying the rewrite and ultimately coming away with better, more elegant
code that functions just as well as, if not better than, before. 

Competency is a good feeling.

---

I feel about a thousand percent better now from three weeks or a month ago. I think my hormones were off. In fact, I'm absolutely sure that my hormones were off, but it had been over a year, maybe even eighteen months, since I'd gone to an endocrinologist.

That itself was a game and a half. Down in Texas, as long as one called one's endocrinologist and reported nothing new or no reason to change things, getting a new set of refills was simple. In Pennsylvania, however, one has to see one's prescribing physician at least once every twelve months to keep one's prescription current. This means more than a phone call.

Nobody informed me of this when I got here.

I used to see one endocrinologist, and he did a good job, don't get me wrong. However, after the first time I saw him, I ended up getting my surgery, and then I was off of my prescriptions for a while, and I had a huge backstock along with more refills, so I just didn't go back to see him regularly. Not knowing I needed to do so regularly, I just figured that when I needed more drugs, I could call him and he'd give me a new prescription.

Imagine my horror to discover that not only could he not refill my scrip but that because it had been over a year since I had last been in his office, he had to see me as a new patient all over again.

Now, I don't know what being a new patient is like in most fields, but in endocrinology being a new patient is jusy shy of going through the Spanish Inquisition. A special office visit taking upwards of an hour is not unusual, and endocrinologists are the type that can pick and choose their patients and set their own hours, and so they often do. When I called to get an appointment, I found out that I couldn't get one until the end of June.

This was in March.

I took the appointment, of course; to turn it down would have been foolish. I had plenty of pills left, so I wasn't too concerned. However, it was not to be. The endo called me back about a week prior to the appointment and
said he wouldn't be able to be in the office that day and he asked me if I could reschedule. I said yes, because saying no would have gotten me nothing. I was shy about a week on my prescription to get me to the rescheduled date, but I called my general practitioner and he gave me an emergency cover dose for ninety days which would neatly hold me through to my date.

I missed that one because of work.

I called the doctor the next morning, frantic and begging for a reschedule. The first date he had was December. That was far past the end of my drugs. I nearly flipped. However, Jessie was seeing a different endocrinologist, so I went out on a limb and called him. Lo and behold, he had an opening! In September! I took it, eagerly, and scheduled the day off of work.

My prescription ran out a week short of the day I could get in to see the new endo.

I wasn't about to ask my GP for another extension, so instead I hatched a clever plan to cut back my dosage by a quarter every day, so that I could over the time save enough enough extra pills for a three-quarter dose all the way to the date of the appointment, at which point I could go back on my full strength. This was a great idea, except for one tiny factor: I was going crazy.

There's this thing that happens to post-ops, that I inadvertantly discovered the hard way: after surgery, the body doesn't have to fight against all of the testosterone and so it takes a smaller dosage of estrogen to keep things on an even keel. Consequently, the extra dosage above and beyond can cause unexpected side effects, like crazy-bitch syndrome.

Jessie, I'm sure, would be willing to attest to my slow mental demise over that time period. It was nothing clear-cut, to be sure, and I had plenty of lucid days, but the frequency, intensity and duration of my freakings-out were all on the rise, slowly but surely, and at one point Jessie did indeed suggest that I go back into therapy 'cause I was wigging out like mad. 

Two days after cutting back my dosage to seventy-five percent, I felt human again. No more—or at least no more crippling—breakdowns. No more screaming. No more tears. I've been sane. Mostly. Almost. Some approximation thereof.

My new endocrinologist has officially dropped my dosage to the new level and suggested I keep it there. He's also suggested some other tweaks to my dosages to perhaps help me with breast growth, since I didn't wind up with as much there as I'd like. That, though, will have to wait until my November check-up.

Now I just have to remember to go get my pills from the pharmacy tomorrow. I'm out.

What memes around, memes around, they always say. All of them. Always. Tell your friends. More interviews with the Martian, this time from Joanne.

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.

---

I know (or can reasonably guess) where your chosen first name and middle name came from, but where did your (recently replaced) surname come from?

Here, actually. This and the character of Theresa Davis from my old Hayden Heath stories. Mostly the latter, but I don't have a convenient link to post. Theresa actually came into sharp focus when Jessie and I were working on Larkin '06, and while we have extensive notes for the setting and characters, we have very little actually done. However, we do have enough for me to say that Theresa turned out to basically be where I was when I was eighteen, a fact I only aceepted in far hindsight, so when it came time to pick a new name for myself, I took the one I had already basically been given.

What influences would you primarily blame for your having gotten into (for lack of a better descriptor) fringe things like RHPS and jello wrestling?

Saying I "blame" some outside influence for these things implies that I wouldn't have picked them on my own. For the former, that's not true, though the person who introduced me to the movie (and took my RHPS cherry) would actually be the same person that asked me at one point to remove all mention of him from my webpage, so even though I want to say who he is, I really can't in good conscience. I wish I could.

The latter... is harder to explain. There was a day and age when I flaunted my morbid obesity against the world as a defense mechanism against my own self-loathing. I fueled my emotional shields on the repulsion of others and laughed at their discomfort to hide from my own. The Ex and I got invited to an end-of-the-school-year party for some college friends, and they had decided the theme of the night would be jello wrestling, and so we joined in the fray. Wearing only an electric blue speedo and rolling around in a hundred litres of flavored jello didn't seem that strange at the time. In all honesty, everyone else was doing it too.

Has this special ability of yours to attract weirdos and freaks come about "recently" (like, when getting on the net), or have you had it all your life?

Rather than ask when I developed this ability, why not ask instead what is it about the people with whom I associate that makes them weirdos and freaks? I don't really see them in that light. The term "freak" is almost always a positive one from me, indicating a train of thought that had eluded me or that would not have come naturally to me but whose beauty I can appreciate even if I disagree with it. In this way, everyone is a freak in some fashion; the secret is in figuring out that one card on the bottom of the stack that makes the whole house come crashing to the ground, and then tapping on it with a tuning fork to make the house of cards vibrate.  

What is it that keeps you putting your paws into burning? (of any kind - it just seems a little more foward/aggressive than I would expect of a bunny)

For this, I must dip into the Pink.

I have often spoken in the past of totems, and I have been known to say that Bear is my totem while Hare is my companion. Bear is that to which I aspire while Hare is that which I am. As I have explained many times in the past, Bear is the teacher, the healer, the guardian and the protector. I have no need to re-explain Bear. Hare, on the other hand, I don't think I have ever really explained.

To the Greeks, Hare is the spirit of sensuality and hedonism. To the Japanese, Hare is the face of the Moon. To some Amerind traditions, Hare is the spirit of fear and of safety. To others, Hare is Coyote's little sister. She is the trickster that is caught in her own traps. Hare gets caught by the Tar Baby. Hare throws rocks at hornets' nests, and often as not gets stung because of it.

Of course, to say that this is why I enjoy sticking my paws into burning would be to put the cart before the horse. I don't believe in playing ex post facto with my logic, so instead I'll divert into a different religion all-together: SubGenius. The SubGenius must dip into the Pink to come out Slack. This is a very trite saying, but in essense, or at least to my understanding of it, the SubGenius must constantly retest and reevaluate damaged ideas to ensure that they are indeed broken. It's not enough to say "I know the sun will rise" the SubGenius must get out there and see it happen.

This doesn't really explain it any better either, though, but it's about as close as the first. So, perhaps with these two ideas as background, I can at least wend my way around to an actual answer. The truth is that I stick my paws into burning because I believe in challenging mistaken ideas in the hope that those who hold them will see that they are mistaken and correct them. I challenge my own ideas or at least I try to do so because the only way I fix problems is by constantly testing them to ensure that I'm not mistaken in my understanding. I also have an intense dislike of what I believe is internal inconsistency, in myself and in others. When I see things that look like they're misaligned in that fashion, I find myself poking at them kind of like picking at a mental scab. Either they heal, or they fester into something gangrenous that requires the whole mess be lanced and regrown from bank tissue. Either way, the offending scab is gone. =n.n=

You keep talking about redesigning your website, but I've yet to see it happen - why is that? And what are you considering doing as a theme? ( or did I just hit on the reason why it's not happening? :) )

Pretty much, yeah. The theme I have in mind is one that I would like some help from Jessie in designing the visuals (shock horror; I'm thinking about graphics on a webpage), but there just hasn't been the time to sit down and do any sort of real design work on it. I know what I want, but I have yet to see how practical it will be in an actual implementation.

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=

It always happens that right after I throw a McMassive Hissy Fit^TM over something that's horribly broken or frustrating, I find a fix to my problem that works out so well that my previous temper tantrum looks like just that.
I suspect that this is either a conspiracy to make me look even more childish than I actually am, or else it's the Cosmic 2x4's way of saying "You're my Special Friend."

Today I called the Philadelphia County courthouse, laid bare the situation and asked them if they could issue me a license. She said that as long as my driver's license said female on it, there was no issue. They'd mark the paperwork as "legal name change" and be done with the matter. No need for birth certificates or other certifications.

I was aghast. I told the clerk there what the Montgomery County court had required. Her response was, and I quote, "Oh, the people up in Montgomery County are a bunch of assholes."

I love Philadelphia. And Philadelphia loves me back.

Parallel to this, Jessie is now legally Jessie, which I know has been a huge morale boost at home. I only wish yesterday that I had been in as good a mood as Jessie was. Knowing that Jessie wanted to celebrate and that I was being such a downer over the whole marriage thing only made my depression seem that much worse.

I don't think I'll have any trouble celebrating tonight, though the real party will be next Wednesday, once we've got the license in hand. I'm trying not to get my hopes up unnaturally high, but things are really looking good
right now.

One of these days, I'm going to meet God. I intend to kick Him in the nuts, if he has them. Or tits, if She doesn't. Or ass, if Zie lacks those as well. Maybe all of them.

I am now two years post-operative. I have been living as a woman full-time for over three years. I have a passport and drivers' license that both identify me as female. I haven't received mail, electronic or otherwise, addressed to my old identity in nearly a year. My past life should at this point well and truly be behind me.

However, when applying for a marriage license in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, the clerk of the court is required to ask for parents' full names as part of the process. I dutifully supplied both of my parents' full names without question. My father's last name is Hughes. My mother's maiden name is Blysard.

My last name, of course, is Davis.

The clerk looked me strangely for a moment, then asked me for proof of my change of name. I blinked, blinked again and asked why she needed it. She said that normally she wouldn't but because my name didn't match either of my parents', that she had to have proof of continuity of lineage. I said I could probably find that paperwork, did so and returned to the office.

She looked at that paperwork and asked me for proof of my sex change. My drivers' license obviously wasn't good enough. Neither was my passport. I eventually had to find the letter from my surgeon saying that I had indeed been through the sex-change operation and that I was now a functional female in every regard. I promptly faxed this document to the clerk's office and called to confirm they had received it, whereupon they notified me that I would have to call back in a few days after the friend-of-the-court lawyer that reviewed all their strange cases had looked over my documents.

I waited the requisite two days, then called back to confirm earlier today to ask if they had finally gottem my license ready. The clerk's supervisor then informed me that I would need to submit an amended birth certificate
and that the letter from my surgeon wasn't sufficient as it wasn't from a recognized United States agency.

Santa Clara County, California—the county in which I was born—does not list sex on their amendments. All they amend is name.

I explained this no less than four times to the supervisor. Every time, all she said was, "Then I can't issue you a marriage license." She even managed to say it four different ways, I think. I was so livid at the moment that I didn't hear her too clearly.

"Livid" does not begin to describe my mood. Every person in the legal system along the way has openly admitted that had I not changed my last name, none of this would have ever happened. They would never have asked
and thus never have known that my name had been different. If I had, in fact, changed my last name to my mother's maiden name, they would have simply assumed that my mother had later remarried and never thought twice about it. However, since I did change my name, they inquired and thus found out about everything else that they claim is sufficient grounds to deny me a marriage license.

The state of Pennsylvania recognizes me as female on my drivers' license. The Social Security Administration recognizes me as female in their paperwork. The Passport Authority recognizes me as female on my travel papers. However, because the county of Santa Clara does not list sex on their birth certificate amendments, the county of Montgomery claims the right to deny me the right to marry.

Now, of course, the thing I want to do is call them back and ask them if I can marry a woman. The supreme irony of being the groom at my wedding might offend, shock or otherwise horrify people, but at this point the people at the Montgomery County Courthouse have ruled that I'm not a chick, and in their two-sex world, that makes me a guy for the purposes of gettin' hitched.

What I'm probably going to do is find the closest county to Montgomery that doesn't ask all these stupid questions and doesn't have a residency requirement, then go there and get the marriage license and ceremony performed over some weekend in the near future. Barring that, I'm calling Santa Clara County and asking the clerk there if the amendment on my birth certificate can be... well... amended.

I am angry beyond words, and yet I feel strangely as if I have been given exactly what I should've expected. I allowed myself to hope that the people who could have made this happen would be better than they were, and I have paid dearly for my assumptions.

Anthrocon is already turning into something of a blur. That's how it felt at the time, too. Either I was helping Sue run programming, I was in my room sleeping, or I was out chatting with friends that I hadn't seen in a year or more. The only time I ever really got to just sit was during Uncle Kage's Story Hour, which is usually the single biggest "panel" at the convention and hardly a respite from the hordes.

I finally got to meet Ben Goodridge in the flesh, which after seven years of knowing him is probably a good thing. Strangely, we hardly talked about writing at all, but we did at least get the chance to play a quick catch-up game before hastening off to go attend to other duties. I also got another chance to see LeDiva, which is always good. I wish she lived closer; she seems the sort of person around whom I could really enjoy spending a lot of time. Plus, the Lansdale area can always use more gamers.

The only thing I personally didn't like about how things went is that I found out after the fact that I was supposed to be running a panel. The annual reading of the Eye of Argon had been scheduled Friday night, but I had had to work that day and so when Sue asked me if I was going to make it, I said I hoped I would. She thought I had confirmed that I would run the panel. I only thought she wanted me to participate. So, an hour after the panel
started, she called me frantically on the radio asking me where I was and why I wasn't in the room running things! I'm still embarrassed about this one, frankly. Next year, though, I'll know better.

Hopefully, I'll also be able to get time off of work next year to attend. This year, I've been fighting the Project From Hell, a supposedly simple test exercise that has become my driving focus for the past six weeks and now has a hard deadline of Wednesday to deliver. If I thought getting it done before was a problem, now it's downright painful. I'm still not entirely happy with how the automated scripts are handling it, and I've got to run everything from scratch again. I started to do that over the weekend, but the array of hard drives at work ran out of space and so I couldn't get any work done over the time period I thought I would have to do raw processing. So, this is going to be a nightmare few days while I frantically try to get this cranked out to the customer by Thursday morning.

I'm glad I got the chance to attend. More importantly, I'm glad I got the chance to help make the con a better place to be.

---

Of course, the day after I get back from such an exhilirating weekend, the Cosmic 2x4 had to make its feelings known again. I got to test out my air bag today. The driver ahead of me sped up to pass a dump truck, then slammed on her brakes at the green light at the next intersection when the siren of an approaching ambulance sounded. Her brand-new 2004-model car jerked to a complete stop in about two feet, but my old 1990 brakes locked and I slid into her bumper.

I couldn't have been going more than about 10MPH when I hit, but it was enough for the sensor to detect potential driver damage and deploy the SRS—supplemental restraint system, for once—right in my face. I wasn't even going fast enough to hit the airbag. The seat belt caught me instead, and so I was treated to a faceful of scorched talc as the bag snapped out of its hidey-hole. The whole car stank until I rolled down the windows and let the car air out while the other driver ran around panicking that she was in her boss' car.

I don't think the insurance will get involved. Nobody got hurt, neither of the cars suffered worse than scratches unless you count my air bag, and the cop that arrived when the other driver's boss called ruled the accident as a no-faulter. Plus, the other driver's boss sent the other driver back to work by foot and then claimed himself as the driver of record on the accident, so I don't think he's going to try to file anything at this point.

I'll still be out a hefty chunk of change replacing the airbag, but even that's preferable to having to replace the car again.

I put them on yesterday morning, and I'm still wearing them this morning. I had them off for a brief period of emotional instability yesterday afternoon, but then I was wearing them again inside of an hour.

Part of me is quietly disgruntled that I'm doing something as an exercise in self-delusion, and that's been one of my biggest fears for so long that the internal suggestion of pulling the wool over my own eyes, for any reason, makes me want to stop what I'm doing instantly and atone to some nameless deity for trying to lie to myself. I'm not, though. I'm not lying to myself about what I'm doing. I'm fully aware that when I look down and I see my shirt stretched out over my chest that it's not really me that's causing it. That doesn't stop me from smiling when I look in the mirror at seeing what I wanted to see when I first started my transition.

Even now, I find saying the word "breastform" out loud to be difficult. "Fake tits," while closer, is something to be said with a self-deprecating snicker, and thus isn't what I want. There is a part of my psyche that says that having gone through this entire process without wearing them, to do so now is somehow to cheapen what I've already done and rob it of its meaning. I don't wear makeup to cover my shadow. I don't lie about my past. I recognize that I'm not where I want to be yet, and I live with it. I don't try to hide behind crutches.

Why, then, does the simple act of putting on a shirt and having to work around my own chest make me smile the way I did when I first put on a skirt and went for a walk outside?

If anything, everything I've done before has been the "self-delusion", saying that I was happy with my body as it was. Yes, I want to be heavy-chested. Perhaps not as large, proportionately, as some of my friends, but definitely
bigger than I am now. I've wanted this since the beginning of the changes. I've known that when I crossed my arms across my chest that I wanted to feel my own breasts resting on my forearms, and that even with the forms I'm wearing now they don't quite feel large enough in that regard. I have such a hangup about feeling like I'm lying, to myself or to anyone else, that even openly saying that I want something like this I'm having to fight internally because I feel like I'm making statement that this is what I already am, not that this is what I want.

As Jessie pointed out, I was using the ladies' bathrooms for eighteen months before I had my surgery. I could say nobody could see what I had under my crotch, but with some of the cuts of jeans I like to wear that's not true
either.

I'm not comfortable wearing these in public, but I've started to investigate alternatives.

---

Work is actually going well. I know since saying I had a job I hadn't really said anything else about my position, but that's mostly because in the last two months I haven't had the time to actually do much beyond work.

I've always said that I would rather be too busy than too bored. This job promises to test my belief in that idea.

I'm currently working with Bennie at an Evil Data Collection Company, which is to say my job consists primarily of taking slices out of a McHuge pile of data and serving them up to clients, or else I'm taking client data and then cleaning it and checking it against ours for consistency. It sounds fairly dull, and a lot of the job can be repetitive, but with the way the office runs it's rarely a dull moment, and those are usually a welcome reprieve from the rest of the craziness. 

Working with someone that was already a friend prior to the job has been an excellent boost to my morale about the company. My ramp-up time has been incredibly quick, and within a week I felt like I was being a productive
part of the team. The fact that I received a task that has literally taken me from my second week to next Tuesday to finish has been proof that my role here is fairly safe. This project is almost certain to be a repeat one, and every time I do it I get slightly better at it, which is a good sort of stability.

I know I bitch about the salary thing a lot, but I really do feel like I'm being underpaid. I have, in the two months that I've worked there, left half an hour early on three days, and put in at least three twelve-plus hour shifts to finish up projects that had to be done by a certain deadline. I can only hope that at the end of my six-month "trial period," my manager and the HR guy see the effort I've done as worthy of being rewarded. I've already been promised at least another five grand a year. I'd like to think I've proven myself worth more than that.

Sadly, I'm finding that the more money I have, the more things I find on which to spend that money. I've still got to get out of debt, but at the same time I'd like to be able to start planning for my eventual retirement and I've also
got getting into a house to consider. Then, too, there's everything that the aforementioned topic will cost to fix. Plus, that Jessie's asked me on a few occasions now to look into school and the associated costs. While in the long run I see that as a step towards larger income, I know in the short run that it will cost me more money that I'm going to need to start setting aside today to cover.

Right now, getting into a house seems like the fastest means of getting more income on the table. If I can get a duplex or triplex, or even a large enough single-occupancy house to give Kelly her own space, it should cost me less to manage than staying in an apartment. The extra money from that will free up immediate budgetary concerns. Putting money away towards retirement is a lofty ideal, but sadly I know it needs to wait until I can get other things paid off. Fourteen percent interest trumps ten percent dividends.

Life never stops throwing curve balls. It's all a question of how much effort one wants to spend in trying to catch them.

Money right now is really tight. I'm making more than I was on unemployment, but our bills have gone up by a larger factor than my income has, and the recent spate of expenses related to hosting the Bash this year have all taken their toll on the available money. Plus, I've been cutting some friends short-term loans. None of these are really a problem, but I keep forgetting I only get paid twice a month now, instead of every two weeks, meaning the money I make on each paycheck has to go just a wee bit further than it did before, and that stretching is hurting.

Right now, I'm in the precarious position of needing to wait until my paycheck clears to be able to pay rent. This should happen tonight, but then again I thought it would happen this morning and it didn't, so I'm staring at a bank account balance that may well dip briefly into the negative before everything catches up with where it's supposed to be. I hate it when that happens, I really do. I've got overdraft protection, but that's going to cost me if it triggers, and I can't really afford any more fees right now.

At least I know I'm getting a good chunk of change on Friday.

The budget woes are not directly responsible for my next big mindgame, but they do play a significant factor. I've become increasingly aware in recent weeks just how unsatisfied I am with the results of my transition. It isn't that I wish I hadn't started; nothing could be further than the truth. It's that I got seventy percent of what I wanted up top, eighty-five to ninety percent of what I wanted below, ninety percent of what I wanted on my voice, fifty percent from the laser, et cetera, and when you start multiplying all these percentages, the actual success rate seems very small.

I pass fine, but I'm still not really happy with what I see, and there just isn't the money right now to pay for any more changes, and what changes remain are all the costly ones like more electro to clear the last of my facial hair, surgery to increase my bust size, and the like. Maybe even a depth increase since I didn't take care of myself after my surgery the way I should have. 

That last is way down on the priority list, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't want it.

I considered for a while experimenting with falsies, but every time I think about it, I feel really icky and for the longest time I could never figure out why it bothered me as much as it did. I think I understand why, now. When
I started my transition, every time I undressed after spending a weekend or a day or an hour or whatever in what I considered proper dress, I would start crying uncontrollably. The illusion disappeared when I took away the trappings, and that distressed me greatly. Now, I'm afraid of going through that disappointment again. I know they're fake, and so trying them on will only make me upset when I have to stop.

Sadly, that seems to be my best option right now. At least, it's my most affordable one.

My credit card is still over ten thousand dollars in debt, which is a source of great frustration. I'm slowly paying the backlog of bills, but the number is intimidating. I owe more money right now than I'm worth in terms of hard assets, and that's a difficult thing to face. I hope by next year some time I'll be in an actual house and paying towards equity, but that's just a pipe dream for now.

So many things come down to money. I wish they didn't.

So far, I have to say my new job has been going exceptionally well. The hardest part of it, I think, is getting up in the morning consistently and making myself presentable and at least semi-coherent by the time I have to be at Bennie's to carpool into the office. Working with someone I know has been great; it's really helped me get into the swing of things quickly. It doesn't hurt that he's been a good teacher, giving me enough to do that I'm almost never bored while not giving me so much that I feel overwhelmed by the amount on my plate.

I got my first paycheck today, which was exceptionally nice. I do have to say, though, that I wish it were higher. It's still weird to think of the fact that I'm now making about three-fourths of my previous salary, and only gettings two paychecks a month instead of one every two weeks (twenty-four pay periods, instead of twenty-six) makes that nice "bonus paycheck" a thing of the past. Still, that would really have to be the only major downside to my job, and with the perk of getting lunch on the company dime, I'm probably still coming out even.

Actually, having the company order lunch has been an exceptional boon to my budget, because I'm dieting again. Between the depression of being out of work, and the bad attitude borne of not wanting to think about stressful
things while I had other, more important, stressful things about which to worry, I found one morning recently that the scale said "EE" when I stood upon it. Now, that could be considered one of my goals, but not that one, and it was a rather rude shock. I always said, at least to myself, that I would never break three-hundred again, and I had. So, now I eat a diet-food breakfast, a diet-food dinner, and have my one decent meal at the company's expense. This means that when Lean Pockets are on sale, I'm only spending two dollars a day on food, plus whatever diet soda costs if the fridge at work is empty.

The utter lack of self-pity that staying true to oneself and one's values requires is, I think, one of the hardest things in life to have and to keep. I find it far too easy to wallow in self-deprecation and bemoan what has not gone my way, rather than actually fix things and keep them fixed. Things that take constant and repetitive maintenence, especially ones that aren't fun in and of themselves, are very difficult for me. Dieting isn't just once; it's for life. I am not the sort of person that, once at an ideal weight, can eat whatever whenever and not gain it all back. Keeping up with dilation and exercise has been difficult as well, despite the desirability of the end-goals, because the path to get there is work. Even DDR hasn't been "fun," though I do enjoy the activity, at least for a while.

Someone asked me recently, "what is Hare?" The question seems like a non sequitur, but the answer isn't. To me, hare is the admission of helplessness. She's the recognition and divestiture of defense mechanisms, lies, deceits and self-absolutions. She is not that which leads me astray, but that which lets me recognize when I have led myself astray, and then bring myself back.

Through Hare, I find within myself the courage to stand naked, stripped of self-delusion. There is much about myself that I do not like, but I have the strength to recognize these things, not to hide from them. I hate dieting, but I hate being fat. I hate dilating, but I hate being too tight and too shallow. I hate exercising, but I hate being out of shape. In Hare, I have the power to admit these things, and to work on fixing them. Hare is not the solution, but she is the understanding of the problem.

Nobody stays in Atlantis by faking reality in any manner whatsoever. 

Last Friday, I took my car back into the shop because it's been stalling on me. I don't just mean "sometimes it dies and I have to restart it," either. If that were all it were doing, I could live with that. I had a Chrysler that did that for several years before its electricals finally gave up in the middle of an intersection in downtown Dallas during rush hour. No, I mean it stops and refuses to start for at least ten minutes, then belches forth the most noxious cloud of unburnt gasoline imaginable, and then has a fifty to sixty percent chance of stalling again immediately upon dropping the gear from park or neutral back into drive. It did this once as I was taking Jessie to work, and my mate was late because of it, so I figured it was time to once again have the thing in the shop.

Now, this is the third time since I've gotten it that I've had to have it repaired for various issues relating to stopping or not starting. First I had to tow it because it wouldn't start at all. Then I had to drive it to the shop because it would stall and refuse to start. Then for a while it was fine, but after about two weeks it would start stalling on me. However, during this period it just restarted when I turned the key again, and I figured I could live with that until I had a job and could afford to get it into the shop or get it replaced. Now it's doing exactly what it did before, and I have again put it to the shop.

This time, though, the mechanic said that he let it sit for two hours on idle, and he gave it some test drives, and he could never make it stall. He surmised that the transmission was b0rqed, that something called the torque converter was shot because late-eighties Chryslers were known for problems with whatever device in the engine exists for converting torque. He told me to take it to his transmission specialist to get this piece of repairwork done, and not knowing anything about cars other than how to operate them, I took his advice. 

The transmission mechanic called me back yesterday afternoon and said, "I had a look, and the transmission is fine, but did you know you're in the danger zone as far as oil goes?"

At this point, I must digress and discuss an old RPG called Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness. This game, which I received when I was probably fourteen or so, is one of the things that strongly cemented my
interest in furry, and for the longest time I thought this game was one of the coolest on earth because you got to play an animal. How cool was that? None of this boring human nonsense. Animals were cool.

If this wasn't cool enough for you, the supplements they made for the game, with the exception of Adventures and Transdimensional, all related not to TMNT's original world but to Palladium's own post-apocalyptic update to the
setting, called After the Bomb. After the Bomb, or AtB, was the shiznit of settings. It had talking animals. It had magic. It had superhero powers. It had post-holocaust nuclear fallout. It had everything. It was Gamma World
for the kids who never got to play Gamma World, and for the kids that did, it was everything about Gamma World that was cool, without TSR. Mind you, it had Palladium instead, which was trading the hangman for the firing squad, but at least it was something.

Then, as if AtB wasn't enough, Palladium released the supplement to, at the time, end all supplements: Road Hogs. This added the element of fast cars and vehicular combat to the game, meaning it could now appeal to the people who played Steve Jackson's Car Wars as well, and if this didn't get you, you were hopelessly outside the sphere of cool. I ate this stuff up with a spoon when I was that age, and I adored the ideas spawned by the game.
Never mind that ten years later I would look back at all this fascination and money and time spent and laugh my head off at my own foolishness. At the time, I was seriously all over this stuff.

Road Hogs gives all sorts of rules for various mechanics that you can have working on your car, all the way from apprentice in the craft up to the Lord God Guru Wrenchmaster or whatever they called the chief expert. One type, however, fell squarely outside the range of good, bad and guitarist: the mechanical empath. This person wasn't really a mechanic, but a doctor of sick machines, and zie instinctively just knew what was wrong and how to make them work again. Zie could do stuff to an engine, a car or a water-recycler that would look totally unrelated to the actual problem, and have the thing humming along smoothly without effort. I always
thought these were the best.

Unfortuntely, the mechanical empath had one major drawback if you used that type of person to fix your vehicles: anything fixed by them would only stay fixed as long as they hung around. Outside some fixed radius, machines that they built or repaired would start to malfunction again, and ordinary mechanics couldn't fix them. Only the empath had the know-how to figure out what they really wanted and make them happy again, and eventually if away from their loving masters for long enough machines would just up and die, fall to spare parts and used oil, and there was nothing anyone else could do. Often, even rebuilding them wouldn't help.

There are times I fear that this is the power that Tanya's father wields.

The mechanic to whom I've been taking this car since I received full possession of it has outright said to me, "I can't figure out why it's stalling." Tanya said to me when she gave me the car that it had an oil leak, but that if I just put in a quart of oil every time the idiot light flickered, I would be fine. I actually put two into it every time, because I killed my last car by driving it without enough oil for too long. I still managed to get it so low that the transmission guy chastised me for it. 

I am hoping beyond hope that the problem of stalling is related directly to the fact that the car is leaking oil at a fast enough rate to have been keeping the engine below optimal running conditions but not so fast that it's been taking the gunk out of the sump with it. I'm five thousand miles past when my sticker says I should've changed it, mostly because I figured if I was leaking oil as fast as the idiot light indicated, I couldn't possibly have a build-up of crap in the oil pan. I've known plenty of cars that operated on that very principle.

Not that I'm hoping I've been driving without enough oil, mind you. As I said above, that's why the Escort—the car Kelly's now driving until she gets her Firebird fixed—rattles like a cocaine baby with a plastic hammer and teething problems. I just hope that by fixing this leak, somehow miraculously the other problems I'm having with the car will go away until I can make it to and from Michigan for Jessie's brother's wedding reception and the start of my job. After that, I can start looking for a vehicle more suited to my style of driving. That is, something I can beat into the ground through neglect and that will love me for doing it.

I hate cars. I think they know that, and they fear me for it.

I am officially again a member of the rank-and-file. I have, for the time being, escaped the crack into which I had fallen three months prior. Starting next Wednesday, I will be working with a friend of mine at HMS Online in their fulfillment department, writing scripts and generating data files. After just over four months, I'll be back to work.

I don't think I ever really appreciated how much I enjoyed working until I wasn't. It seems strange to me even now to say it, but it's true. Lacking a job was an incredibly stressful situation. If I had been independently wealthy, maybe I would've enjoyed it, but I wasn't and I'm still not and I won't be for quite some time, though I am putting into motion a plan to fix that. It should only take me fifteen years. At least it's not get-rich-quick.

The job actually sounds like the sort of thing I could really get into doing. It's not high-scale project development, but in a sense I'll be in direct and total control of every project that comes across my desk, and I'll be responsible for the resultant work that goes out to clients. It feels a little like being back at Intervoice, when I would get projects and be the sole developer on them from beginning to end. They weren't this large-scale, but it's the same basic idea.

Mostly, I'm just glad to have a regular income again. Sucking on the  government tit is not only embarrassing, it's demoralizing. I know at any point I could've gone and gotten a day-job at McSlavey's or ReichBurger or GreedMart or whatever, but I think if I had I would've taken a massive hit to my self-esteem, an even larger one than I had when I lost my job. It really did hit me pretty hard, a fact I struggled not to let affect me greatly, but it was hard.

In fact, the only thing about this job that I have to say I don't  like from the outset is the fact that I'm taking what amounts to over a twenty percent paycut from my last job. However, considering it's a twenty percent increase over my unemployment benefits which end in two months, I'm not going to complain too loudly. Plus, they've already said that in six months I'm up for a performance-based salary review, and that if they keep me at that time I should be seeing a substantial pay increase. It still won't be what I was getting before, but it's a lot better than nothing.

Plus, the work itself promises to be fun. Having seen the stress through which my coworker-to-be has had with the position, "fun" doesn't seem like the most appropriate word. However, now we'll both be working with someone we know, which is always a plus. The workload will be divided between us, which will be good for him. This sounds at least on the surface like the kind of work I'm bound to enjoy, which is a definite plus. To top it all, I've met some of the other coworkers at the company, and they all seem like good people and apparently I made a good impression on them. 

I can't wait to start.

---

Sadly, no good deed ever goes unpunished, and to make up for my happiness in getting a job, the newish car that Tanya secured for me has decided to return to its state of unhappiness at existence in general. Shortly after I got it, it died at one point and refused to start. I had it towed to the mechanic's and he fixed it. After that, it started but every so often it would stall and refuse to start for ten minutes afterwards. I drove it to the mechanic's that time, and they again fixed it. About a week after that, it started stalling on me again, but every time it stalled I was able to start it immediately without issue, so even though I considered this a great annoyance, I told myself I would get it fixed at such time as I had a job with which to pay for the repairs.

Today it stalled on me again as I was taking Jessie to work, and it again wouldn't start after it died. Further, when it did start after dying, it died again when I dropped it from park into drive. It did this four times getting it to Jessie's workplace. Then it stalled again getting it home.

This seems almost too cosmically coincidental for works. Nightshade, if you did anything recently to get rid of your 2x4, I think I know where it went. Damn thing won't leave me alone.

It's never died on a freeway, so I think I can trust the engine. However, at this point I don't think I can trust anything else on the car. I'm going to take it to my mechanic one last time and ask them to find everything on the
car that needs to be fixed and get an estimate for the repairs. I have another vehicle that I can borrow from a friend in the meantime, and hopefully either I'll find out that the repairs are within a reasonable margin, or I'll find
out they're not and can get another car as a replacement.

Maybe I can trade the Acclaim back to Tanya for the Lincoln she was going to give me in the first place. *grin*