I have found myself with a sizeable uptick in the amount of couch time I have each week. The mental fatigue from existing at this current juncture has me spending more time mindlessly binging, or shooting my way through the Wolfenstein games while my wife visits islands on Animal Crossing. Even before this, our couches were on their last legs, figuratively, because they never sent the legs when we purchased them. All 80lbs of our dog lumbering on them day in and out, as well as never being the best in quality had worn the cushions down to thin, lumpy […]
Bicycling through the Aftertimes
Stephen Colbert phrased our current reality accurately when he referred to it as “The Aftertimes” this week. I am currently at work, for my first shift since Monday (today is Saturday) and I have one arrival to occupy the next seven hours and seventeen minutes. We finished Tiger King on Tuesday, and even with purchasing a membership for my Xbox that allows me to play over 100 games; I have begun to slip into a mind-melting boredom, and completely understand how people living alone during this are genuinely losing their sanity. So, I did what any sane and rational adult […]
Rise of the Digital Queerspace
The world feels weird, and I like everyone, am struggling to make sense of it. A week ago, more people clambered about whether our now reality was a pandemic or a panic, and when this prints in a week, who knows what normal will be. Being queer is a bag unto itself, but adding in quarantines, speculation and fear about our medical limits, and the collapse of the service, airline and hospitality industries-three industries that employ a vast majority of us- and it becomes quite easy to see why I have spent a lot of this week in my kitchen, […]
In Another Universe
It had been a rough first couple of months. Thanks to puberty blockers, my body had not had any hormones running rampant in two years, and when I started testosterone injections immediately following my 16th birthday, the mood swings and flares of anger caught me off guard. Being consciously aware of my height kept me from lashing out at the vocal bigots in the cafeteria, but I found myself storming into the stalls in the boys’ room on multiple occasions. I knew teen boys felt anger, having a brother 18 months younger than me had keyed me into that. But […]
The Gravity of Bullying
I wore an eye patch from third grade through sixth grade. I was the mixed-race tomboy with one eye. While my obvious differences rarely reared their ugly side in elementary school, they became my sole identifier by middle school. The first time I was called a homophobic slur was when I was referred to as a Pirate Dyke on the school bus. After my flute was stolen and thrown into the yard of an aggressive dog and the school deemed it not their problem, I changed bus stops, where I was pelted with rocks on my way home each day […]
A Reluctant Valentine’s Plan
The last time my wife and I had Valentine’s Day off together, Barack Obama was in the middle of his first term in office. She was a college freshman, and I was preparing to transfer after attending a community college while I cleared up an outstanding student loan balance from my time at Wesleyan. We had tickets to the professional orchestra that was housed at our university and made plans to go out for dinner after the concert. To top off our romantic evening, I bought us a bottle of Boone’s Farm; and we spent the rest of the night […]
A Blast from My Past
A couple of months ago, I wrote about my struggles to reconnect with people from my past. In the 15 years since I graduated high school, I’ve changed a lot more than my name and gender. Hailing from conservative western Maryland, the reality is a lot of my former peers have tenets that, while forged in the name of morality, mean little more to me than an absolute dismantling of my equal rights. Trans, queer, and progressive or not, I still want a connection to my roots. We all crave that sense of grounding that both tethers us to our […]
Neil and I
During one of my weekend trips with my baton teacher to a competition in Ohio, my parents sent me with a Rush cassette for my Walkman. It was Permanent Waves, and I rewound “The Spirit of the Radio” so much the tape was ruined by the time I crossed back into Maryland the next evening. I want to say that Rush – specifically, Neil Peart – is the reason I became a drummer, mediocre or not. But honestly, I don’t remember a time when I didn’t want to play the drums. I’m a second generation band geek, the child of […]
A Boy, Interrupted
Pre-puberty me wasn’t much different from the rest of the little boys I identified with. I played baseball, loved Nintendo, and had dirty, scraped knees and holed-up jeans. Even at ballet or baton twirling, two extremely effeminate things, it was okay, because my brother also participated in them. Baton twirling is something I don’t talk about as an adult. It’s the most clock-able thing about me. I also don’t have a lot of good memories involving it. The combination of trans and not being the pretty little blonde girl who loved pink meant that competitive baton twirling did not want […]
The Force is with Me
Star Wars is my favourite thing. Obviously, I love my wife, pets, and family / friends more than Star Wars, but as for physical items, Star Wars wins, and has for a vast majority of my life. I was six or seven when in an attempt to enjoy child-free silence and get some work done, my father, flipping through the channels, stopped at the beginning of the trash compactor scene. When I used that moment to remark that I like space and science, I opened Pandora’s box with a sledgehammer. I have had a Star Wars cake every single year […]