MOOP!

This is a snippet from a comment I was leaving to someone else. I want to preserve it in my own journal/share with a larger audience:

(I became so much better at presenting feminine once I knew, incontrovertibly, that I wasn't female. Once I had that rock-solid sense of self --and I don't think it was a lightbulb moment for me either, more a long slow slide into recognition of my own lack of gender--, once I knew for a fact that I wasn't a woman, it became so much easier to dress as a woman and I didn't have to be worried at all anymore about "doing it wrong" because I couldn't do woman wrong if I wasn't a woman in the first place.)

I can remember in the way-back-when, my first Highland Ball. All dressed up in a ballgown and finding a purse and doing my hair and feeling so stupid and awkward and awful and wrong. Maybe I wore makeup? Or tried to?

Being feminine used to be so painful, so fraught. Just this painful muddle of "how do women do this". I had so many ideas of what a woman was, and oh of course I knew that gender roles were not constrained and I could be whatever I wanted, but there I was with all these wonderful womanly role models and I still felt like I was constantly falling flat.

Ru Paul has some Problematics, but "you're born naked, everything else is drag" is the most meaningful thing in the world for me. Every way¹ I dress is drag, and that makes it so much easier to do exactly that!

Dressing like a boy --especially formally, in the early days of figuring out my gender, when it was still *so* tied to dancing-- was easy, because I *knew* dressing like a boy was a form of drag. I knew that I was pulling on a not-actually-true gender to play with it, and that knowledge made it very easy to separate and have a jolly time. I couldn't do that in women's formalware for so long. I didn't realize that I should've been playing there too, I thought I was just failing to fit.

God, I'm so much happier these days. Yesterday, at the very start of therapy, Jenn mentioned me in the third person and said "they" and my little heart sang out. Most of the bellsfolk do it most always. On Monday night when I was MCing, I started by introducing myself "and my pronouns are they/them/theirs" (and then a gentle joke, "here is the band and their collective pronoun is also they/them/theirs"). People are starting to learn and listen and respect and call me by the thing that is true and recognize it and see me the way that I have found to see myself.

I spent so long not able to see myself correctly. I didn't know the words maybe, or I didn't quite connect it to who I was.

And now, being agender, I can embrace all the feminine that I like, whenever I want. Kat from high school would've just about died before casually tossing on lipstick on a random day. Now half my selfies have bright-coloured lips, because why the shit not, it's *fun*. And I know (rock-solid sense of self, remember?) that I'm not a woman, so who gives a shit what anyone else sees when they look at me.

More and more though, they're seeing the right thing. Not "a woman who's not good enough at the game". Just...a person. A weird little ADHD agender ball of nonsense, who likes movement and patterns and draws pictures and rings bells and dances and dances and dances. 496 spiders in a red plaid shirt.

Gender is meant to be played with, and if you want permission to do so, you have it. I am somewhat of an authority on the matter, I assure you.

~Sor
MOOP!

1: Well, okay, here's a thing: If you ask me to draw a sketch of mySelf, what I look like, I have an _extremely_ static image. From bottom to top, converse hightops, blue jeans, geeky t-shirt, flannel or cotton overshirt. If we're getting really specific, the shirt in question is my thin red plaid shirt that I wore on the first day of ninth grade. I might even still own that one somewhere.

So yeah, that outfit is not drag. That is the default "what does the sorcyress assume they look like, always". If I was a dress-up doll, that's the outfit I'd start with. Scooby doo character, that's what I have a dozen copies of in my closet.

At 6:56 this morning, I finally dragged my bleary ass upright. I have found checking my email early in the morning can help jumpstart the "actually awake" part of the day, so I glanced at my phone.

Just 7 minutes prior, Julie Parr had sent me an email with a subject line of "Unit 2/3 Results". Oh gods. I always thought I was going to be the last to know, that they were going to come while I was at work and not able to check my mail. I never dreamed I'd be the first to see 'em.

And I read the email...and it doesn't matter what it said, because I am only one person out of a team. The thing that matters is that my brilliant and talented dance-sibs made it, not me.

***

(An aside that I find fascinating: I have been having serious brainweasels about the fact that I have seemed to myself to be far more mean then I would like. It's not a matter of girl socialization per se so much as a wish, a desperate wisk, that I were a better hufflepuff. Being as I have been worried by this latent capacity for brusqueness in myself. (not cruelty, never intentionally cruel, but I have been impatient and more efficient lately than nice --some would find it admirable, I am not sure it's a change for the better, even as I recognize that nice should only be a baseline and is not as important as kind.)

So it was unexpected, and deeply reassuring, to realize that my empathy was in force in such a capacity as to make it actually impossible for me to think about my scores. All my anxiety and hope and fear and crossed fingers and whispered prayer (St Genesius, pray for us) was bound up in THEM. My classmates, my team, my family, my nakama. My own scores are irrelevant as long as THEY made it.

The depth of emotion I feel about this is astounding to me. If you ever wondered, I am not a sociopath. (If you've never wondered, suffice it to say I have.))

***

So there we go. Just short of 7 AM, I've pulled out the real keyoard (too important to type on the phone) and sent off the first email in the "congratulations/commiserations" thread. And then the hard part: Waiting.

At 9:30 AM, I'm standing in the copy room as the RISP whirrs. I check my email again.

All of us.
All five of us.
Both units, ten total exams out of ten, perfect score. We all made it.

I want to cry, and I don't, because that would be hard to explain even as a good thing what with the red eyes and runny nose. I also want to jump for joy, and I do because dear goddess, I am so happy and pleased for this and I've never really let the presence of other people dictate my reactions of happiness. The teachers standing by the main copier do not seem to notice, anyways.

We passed. We all passed. There are five new level one teachers in the Boston branch and they are us!

***

Every
Other
Saturday
For
Eight
Months
We hauled our collective asses to Stow, and if you're local and thinking "that's so far!" oh honey, Connie drove down from motherluvin' Burlington VT! Stephen and I had the short commute, "only" an hour each way to bracket our five plus hours of dancing.

In the weeks between those Saturdays, we read and read and read and read and wrote lesson plans and talked our dances and sent each other snarky texts and practiced our dancing at our own weekly classes --o gods, did we practice.

Hit your thirds, more extension, sink and surge, THIRDS, hands up, hands in, hands relaxed, DON'T LOSE THOSE THIRDS, turnout from the hip, lift from the ankles, tuck in the tuchas, you're still hitting third position, right?, make eye contact across the circle, cover across the set, smile at your partner, and don't forget this is fun, look like you're having fun!

(it was fun. It was also intense. The two states are not mutually exclusive.)

Maybe sometime I will scan and put up the weekly quizzes Gregor wrote for us, every week talking about more figures and our 12 candidacy dances to perform and how to teach better and dance better and BE better. They remain ridiculous, so much of the work remains ridiculous, but every single one of us passed and I can't speak ill of our training, not with that in mind.

I have not been so proud of myself since I realized I knew how to juggle. I am so, so happy words can't even say that our little congratulations party is going to be only that when we have it. I am looking even more forward to ESCape than previously, because daaaamn, we're all gonna be there and it's gonna be *great*.

I'm a certificated dance teacher. Fuck. Yes.

~Sor
MOOP!

(Of course, this is only my level 1, there's still 2 years and two more units before I get my level 2 and full teachership. It's okay, it'll come. I've been spending way too much time this week hyperfocused on the future. It is nice to think just about being happy with the present for a little while.)

So, I was doing NaNoWriMo this year. But it was slow going, and I had everything else ever going on, and between the sudden rush of Splash and Thanksgiving and applying to jobs and getting more meds and being an adult because oh hell do I need to, I kinda found myself giving up somewhere around 26000 words.

I mentioned this to Sparr, who'd been interested in my progress. I believe the exact phrasing I used was something like "if I walk out of this month with a job and a psychiatrist, but novel, I'm gonna call this a successful month."

Well, Dunkin Donuts hired me --I've got one more day of training, and then I get to start as a real live employee of a coffee mega-chain, smiling at customers and repeating their order back to them approximately several billion times. It is not at all glamorous, but they will give me paychecks, and it even pays (a little) better than I was expecting.

(Don't you fret, I've got other things on the backburner as well. There's a long-term sub position I'm really crossing my fingers for, despite all the consternation and gossip it will cause at Squares.)

And I managed to call my old psychiatrist, and he was generous enough to send me one more month's prescription of the ADHD meds. Actually being on my Concerta again (the BEST THING omg) has given me the wherewithal to call and make an appointment with a psychiatrist out in Central Square, who will hopefully be willing to work with me, and make sure that I don't have to run out of Concerta for months at a time. I'm really excited about this.

So that's what I wanted from this month. ( There were a couple other good things, too )

~Sor
MOOP!

My neck _aches_, I've a ton of things to get done tonight and no motivation, dinner was filling but unsatisfying, and my room is freezing.

And then I look up, and realize that there are a half-dozen glow-in-the-dark dinosaurs parading across the top of my windowframe.

Thanks recentpast!Sor. You do good work.

~Sor
MOOP!

Oh hey, I never posted this. It seems pretty readable, so have an essay that's been lying around on my desktop for a couple weeks. I think I wrote it just post-NEFFA or so.

---

So, I don't shave my legs.

(I don't shave my armpits either, but it's a little easier to hide that --I can wear t-shirts all summer. There is weather where pants *really* aren't an option.)

I've never shaved --never really seen the point. My general feeling about it is that the only thing it really accomplishes is boy attraction, and therefore falls into the same category of "completely fucking useless" as wearing make-up does. When I was of an age to learn how and get into the habit, I was also of an age where boys were useless and relationships impossible. For just post-pubescent Sorcyress, boy chasing was the furthest thing from my mind.

As I've gotten older, actually accepted that maybe this relationship idea is not all bad all the time, and started to (on occasion) do things specifically to attract boys^{1, 2}, I've still never bothered to shave my legs. Between the feministy stance and the much larger "I am lazy and a little bit of a perfectionist and I don't want to waste my time doing that to the degree I'd want to" stance, I've just never gotten around to it.

This would not be a problem, were I not a little bit self conscious of my hairy self. Okay, a lot self conscious. I try really quite hard to love my body just the way it is, but as with the stomach thing (mine is round, not flat), I live in a society that has made it very very clear that my body is NOT PERFECT and I should therefore try to fix it.

This is obviously bullshit. The clearest reason I can see for having a societally perfect body is so I can catch myself a man. Maybe if I get to a point where I can't rattle off without thinking the names of ten guys³ who would happily have sloppy make-outs with me I'll shave and start binge-dieting like it's going out of style⁶, but in the meantime, I think I can live comfortably with my really quite awesomely hot body just as it is.

Now, almost a year ago, something in my attitudes changed. Prior to this, I tended to wear a lot of tights, a lot of pants, yes, all summer long. Tank tops would only be worn with an open button-up shirt over them. Society couldn't make me take a razor to skin⁷, but it could at least make me hide the fact that I didn't.

So, a year ago, I was driving somewhere with my friend Jim. It was recockulously hot out, because it was summer in Maryland, and I was wearing shorts. At one point in the conversation, he commented, and I gave my usual "I am lazy and a feminist and therefore don't bother" answer. His response? Totally without mocking "You go girl."

My brain clicked into place, and more or less all was right with the world. That was about the point of my life where I started actively trying to be better about loving my body like it deserves. I've stopped wearing tights when I know damn well they'll be too warm, short skirts are even less the enemy than before, and while I'm still a little bit self conscious wandering out in the world, I'm getting better and better at just not giving a shit.

I don't get in people's faces about it. I don't rail against my smooth-legged friends. ((Hell, when given the invitation, I will happily run my hands up and down my roommates just shaven legs --all of the niceness without any of the itching or stubble the next day!)) I don't even usually bring it up. I just wear short skirts and bare legs and let people decide for themselves whether that's terrible. If people can't be friends with me just because I don't match that idea of normalcy, well, I don't really want them to stick around to find all the other deviant behaviours I indulge in.

I still can't look in the mirror every day and think I'm gorgeous. Hell, half the time I can't even manage seeing "pretty". But I'm getting a lot better at looking in the mirror and seeing myself, exactly as I'm meant to be, and not someone uncomfortable in her own skin.

~Sor
MOOP!

1: I feel that this is about the point in the essay where I should say I'm only using boys because I am too lazy to constantly write out "folk who like girls" I have no problems with being ogled by members of any gender --at least not when I'm in ogleable mode. It's a weird little exhibitionist line, and would probably take another essay to explain.

2: And I still don't often do things specifically to attract people. Rocky Horror and *some* conventions are the only exceptions, and only to a small extent.

3: This is not an exaggeration, and I've thought of at least two more since I said that. And these are just the folk I *know* want sloppy make-outs --I'll be damned if I can ever remember or keep track of how many of you want to take me home and do naughty things with me.⁴

4: ...or to me, but that's a different post, and one I don't feel like putting here. Suffice to say, I think that sloppy make-outs⁵ should have all parties as active participants. More fun like that.

5: This is a euphanism.

6: Or, you know, I'll just get over it and be happily single. Shock, horror, all that.

7: And that's another thing. Razor blade. Can kill people. Scraping against skin. How the *fuck* is this considered normal for *anyone*?

((That being said, I do have maybe a slight preference for clean shaven men. But I've had perfectly nice kissies with boys with beards before, so really, shaven status is totally up to them. Unless they try to grow a pornstache. I do not give kissies to boys with pornstaches.))

So, a proper report of the last few weeks!

On the fourteenth, I got my drivers license, because I am rad.

On the fifteenth, I flew Home and went to ( Arisia )

Nineteenth was Monday of Arisia. While packing, I think to check the internet, find out what time I can move into my dorm. I mean, last year I could doso just post Arisia, it seemed sensible to expect the same out of this year.

...heh.

"Hey mom? It says I can move in at noon. On the twenty-fifth."

Luckily, I had a handy dandy Magus who I could beg into giving me crash space for a week, so I did that.

Twentieth through the twenty fourth, I hung out with Magus, caught almost all the way up on Doctor Who (just need to watch the Christmas Special!), had a grand old time of things, and did a few other things, like harassing j7y more (it is a hobby! Also, we watched Mighty Boosh!!) and babysitting. And maybe I had a teeny tiny breakdown somewhere in the middle of All That, and had to spend a little bit of time righting my brain.

Twenty third was Friday of ( Vericon )

The twenty-fifth I skipped Vericon completely, moved in eventually, hugged my roommates, and got dragged to a lesbians house to watch a movie called "Wristcutters: A love story". I kinda want to write fanfic about that setting, though I think I'm not emo enough. Good movie though, very light and fun and reasonably fluffy. And romantic, of course.

The twenty sixth was today, and I'll report on all my classes once I've had the other two. Can I just say EEEE, CALCULUS! though?

And now food and dance. Ta!

~Sor
MOOP!


1: Conner? Connor? *shrugs*

A/N: The events and things and thoughts and feelings leading up to this particular thoughtstream have been sorted out and reasoned with and talked over and etc. In short, please don't read too deeply into this post, I'm not trying to put it out there as a hint to anyone*, it is merely some words that I think sound good strung together.

***

( friendship privileges )

~Sor
MOOP!

*...anymore.
**This may be less true than I think. I'm not sure how body shy I am at the moment, it tends to vary across a long range, even within the same people.
***Well, technically, I don't want to stoink anybody. Replace with snog/date/pet as appropriate.

Not private because I'm better than that.

Okay, so I know I just posted. (and please go reply to that post!) But I made a Public Service Announcement regarding the fact that my Sonic Screwdriver is NOT a vibrator, and as it keeps making me giggle, I have to post it here.

I'm sure mum's gonna be just THRILLED at what a wonderful student I am and how well I am managing my time.



Thank you for your time.

~Sor
MOOP!

740^a
plus
680^b
plus
650^c
equals
2070^d

~Sor
MOOP!

a: on the critical reading
b: on the math
c: on the writing

d: combined total on the SAT's. Out of 2400. Bitchin.

I've managed to go for a couple days without saying anything about my life, so...yeah. I have a life (sortof)

I guess thats all.

Mmmm...Not really. Lessee...Jonny and Veronica and her two sibs all came over yesterday. We wound up curling up and drawing a lot. Except for Nik and Dan of course. They played video games. No surprise.

Then, later, I wandered around with Moms camera and took pics. I took a bunch of pictures of me and my Sluggy shirt, mostly using the bathroom mirror. I also took a very good picture of my Lego pirate ship. Speaking of which, I need to play with my Lego's some more, their the coolest toys I have, and they have some pretty interesting adventures.

Yeah...So I hung out, and celebrated Sluggy Day by taking a sharpie to the only white shirt I could find. (I KNOW I have others, I just can't find them) I now have a shirt that says:

Got Sluggy?
I do!
Sluggy Freelance
www.sluggy.com

The only problem with it is that it fits me fairly tight, and therefore makes my boobs look much bigger then they actually are. Like tumors, mistakes, and foods I don't like, I prefer my boobs to be on the small side.

I wonder about myself a lot. I'm very good at doing things I don't expect, this is because I don't know myself very well. Or maybe I just don't know how many risks I'm willing to take.

Good dreams last night, Pete (Sluggy's cartoonist) moved in across the street and hierd me to babysit Leah. It was very satisfying, and quite a pity to have to wake up in the morning.

All for now.

~Sorceress/Kat

MOOP!