Comments on LJ

There was a post on this community I follow over at LJ that really struck something in me.  The original poster was speaking about how unhappy they were as a female--to the point of having suicidal thoughts--but couldn't reconcile the idea of being male, either.  They were hurt and confused as to what they were.

A comment from a sympathetic anonymous poster ended with this line:

"Sometimes, I kinda think... what if I was male. But no, it doesn't feel right, either. And why the fuck does this binary have to exists, who the fuck benefits from it?"

I'm not sure what I have to say about this, because the truth is that I don't know either.

But it has gotten me thinking about where I am.  Which...is a very strange point.  A few weeks ago, I was absolutely distraught over how long my hair was getting and with how girly it was making me look.  The funny thing is that it probably wouldn't have been such a big deal if it hadn't been right at Christmas time, and as such, both of my grandmothers, upon visiting them, commented on how happy they were that my hair was getting all long and pretty again.  My immediate response was to say that I hated it and needed to go in for a haircut.  The haircut didn't happen, but I finally decided I'd had enough one night and cut a couple of inches off of it in front of the mirror in the bathroom.  Mind you, it's not the first time I'd cut my own hair.  But this was different.  This wasn't, "my bangs are getting too long, I'd better trim this mess up", it was "I have to get rid of this marker of femininity right the fuck now".  (Of course, my hair is naturally curly, which sucks because the shorter it gets, the more it curls up.)  I ended up doing a pretty bad job on it, just because it was such an impassioned act.  But I felt so much better after the fact.

The strange thing is, I'm going through another feminine cycle right now, and I'm starting to wish my hair was long again--really long, like it was back freshman year, when it was still down to my waist and I'd wear it braided every day.  I am kind of starting to miss that. And I pretty much know that my hair is never going to get that long again, because I'll get angry at it again sometime in the next few months and cut it above my shoulders again.

Why is hair length such a marker of the male/female dichotomy?  It shouldn't be.  Plenty of girls have short hair, and plenty of guys have long hair.  Some of the most feminine girls I know have their hair cropped extremely short.  Of course, at that point, it becomes a rather coquettish thing--which kind of makes me uncomfortable too, the idea that a guy can grow his hair long and not be treated as if he's gay or girly, but a girl cuts her hair short, and depending on the style, she's either treated as being cute (in a childish way) or as being a lesbian.

The binary is mostly unbeneficial because it leads to such horrible double-standards, and even more because we can't just be people.  God forbid a guy should like to sew, or a girl should like football.  Even our hobbies are gendered!  What's wrong with this world that people can't just like what they like and do what they do and everyone else can get over it without passing judgement?

But the binary exists because society likes having neat little categories to put everyone in.  Society doesn't do well when presented with grey areas.

I think this is part of the reason I've become slightly obsessed with gender-neutral names.  I look like a girl, so if I chose to change my name, I could probably get away with taking a male name and be androgynous on that basis. It would actually probably do more to confuse people than taking a name that could commonly be used as a girl name.  My name...at one point in history, my name was a boy's name, but no one has used it that way for better than a hundred years.  If I were interested in transitioning, I'd probably keep my name for this very reason.  As it stands, I'm developing quite the interest in various gender-neutral names, and I'm thinking about taking one when I get to grad school.

This might be why I'm planning on leaving--and by 'leaving', I mean going to another state.  I'd love a chance to start over.  I wasn't comfortable enough in who I was when I was a freshman to change my identity back then, and now that I'm a senior, too many people and professors know me for me to easily go into a classroom at the beginning of a semester and ask to be called by a different name.

I feel like this is a new age for me, though.  Like I'm finally coming into my own.  I could have easily named this blog with the username I've been using since I was 13, since it's become something of an alter ego for me anyway, but I wanted something new.  So I chose Saturday.  There's more to it than that, but for now, that's the important part--I'm Saturday now, because Saturday can be someone new, someone who I've never been before, on the internet or in real life.  And Saturday doesn't have to conform to any expectations, because no one has any.  I may be required to acknowledge the binary, but I certainly don't have to belong to it.

Strange to be in between.

I had a moment of acute gender!fail this week.

I'm taking a fiction workshop night class this semester.  There are only seven people, myself included, in the class, with a male professor.  All of the other students are guys.  I absolutely did not realise that I was the only female body in the room until the professor commented on it.  I looked around, and I was honestly surprised to confirm this fact--not that everyone else was male, but that I had missed this fact because I no longer think of myself as female.

I occupy a female body.  I'm decently comfortable with that, most of the time, unless the Gender Demons strike and I really start hating the fact that I'm a 38-DD.  I found a vest I totally forgot I had about a week ago.  It's water resistant and fleece-lined, which makes it ideal for this weather, especially considering I usually have my hoodie sleeves shoved up around my forearms anyway.  More importantly, it's just barely too tight, and has a zip-front, which means it does a pretty good job of constricting my ample cleavage.

This vest is the best thing that's happened to me lately.

I'm actually at a very strange time in my life.  I've gone through phases with my identity, and I think I'm about to enter another.  When I was in high school, maybe 2004, I started to realise that I was attracted to women, and so began to label myself as bisexual.  Sometime during college, I began to realise that the bisexual label didn't suit me at all--it affirmed an idea I was beginning to reject, that being the concept of a gender binary.  I can't call myself bisexual and recognise that there are more than two sexes, more than two genders.

Shortly after that, probably circa 2007, I started to notice something strange.  I noticed that whatever magical 'femaleness' I was supposed to feel wasn't really there.  Maybe it wasn't there anymore, or maybe it had never been, I don't know.  I can't remember if I ever really felt like a girl.  I know when I was a kid, I was a tomboy.  I was the antithesis of all things feminine.  I hated dresses.  I loved playing outside.  I wanted to play football in middle school.  (I decided as I got older that dresses weren't so bad, but I'll still buck and snort if forced into a dress or a skirt.  I have to really be in the mood.)  I just did not get 'girly things'.  That said, I also loved playing dress-up with my dolls and my costume box, and I loved playing House and Tea Party.  I've always been a little bit genderqueer.  I liked my Barbies and Easy-Bake as much as I liked my Legos and Hot Wheels.

The truth is, though, that I'm not sure how much the 'genderqueer' label fits me anymore, but that's what I get for lurking over at the What Is Gender forums.  There's a lot more out there than I ever expected to find.

What I find fun about these phases I've gone through is that my writing is clearly affected by it, and my characters usually know before I do.  Dameon was bi before I ever started identifying that way.  Now I have Taylor, who is very strictly a Whatever, and I identify more with Tay than I ever have with any other character, even Dameon.  I wanted to be Dameon's best friend.  I just want to be Taylor.  Which I get the chance to do once a week, and that's enough for me.  It's one day out of the week where I'm not expected to present myself as a girl.  For now, it's all the escape from the Gender Demons I need.

On People, Fictional and Otherwise

I've spent my winter break watching M*A*S*H.

I was raised on this show.  It ended four years before I was born.  My mom watched it when it first came on, and it's always been one of her favourite shows.  I have known the tune of the theme song for my entire life--it's right up there with the Andy Griffith theme and the Cheers theme for songs that will forever be locked in my brain.  I can blame Hawkeye for why I'm attracted to dark-haired men with weird senses of humour.  In fact, I'm pretty certain that if I sat down and thought about it, a lot of aspects of my personality could be traced to this show. (I know that more of my original character Dameon is based on Hawkeye than I ever realised; little things kept popping up along the way, and I'd realise much later it was something Hawk had said or done.)  We own all but the last season on DVD.  And I've spent my fall break watching the first seven.

Admittedly, I'm not watching them exactly in order.  I started with seven, then watched six and five, then started on season one about a week and a half ago.  I just finished season three last night.

If you've never seen the series, I want to know what rock you've been living under, first of all, but if you really aren't familiar with it, season three ends with an episode called "Abyssinia, Henry".  The episode is about the unit's commanding officer, Henry Blake, getting his discharge papers and preparing to go home.  At the end of the episode, you find out that his plane out of Korea was shot down, and that Henry, along with all others on board, was killed.  I've seen the episode more than a dozen times, probably, over my lifetime.  I know this episode.  I know what happens.  In a lot of ways, that makes it worse, but after having seen it so many times, I should at least be somewhat desensitised to Henry's death.  I watched the episode last night, and I cried.  I cry every single time I see the episode.  It's not the only episode of M*A*S*H that makes me cry; it's certainly not the only one that affects me emotionally so profoundly.

I was struck by the realisation last night that I have cried more over Henry Blake's death than I did over my own grandfather's death this summer.  At first, it seemed a callous thing, but the more I thought about it, the more I realised that I have always been more deeply affected by fiction than real life.  I don't think it's necessarily that I don't care about real people, but I think it's a testament to the fact that we can never truly know one another.  Even as author John Green advises us to "imagine people complexly", I think it is far easier to relate to and to imagine complexly fictional people than those with whom we have daily interactions.

I'm not saying I care more about Henry Blake than I did about my grandfather.  But I do think that on some level, that might be more true than I care to admit.  With fictional characters, we get more of a window into their lives than we ever do with real people.  We can see what affects them in their most private moments.  We are privy to their secrets and their darkest flaws. We are witness to their mistakes and humiliations.  We partake in their joys and excitement.  Some of the boundaries put in place by the very nature of reality are broken down when we are presented with a well-created fictional character, just as some of the boundaries we put on ourselves may be broken down when we create our own.

I wouldn't be the first person to claim that I put a piece of myself into all of my characters.  And I wouldn't be the first to claim that I see myself in characters others create, either, which I think is why I love M*A*S*H so much.  But I'm thinking now, and not in a worrisome way, about whether I invest more interest in those I feel intimately familiar with, like Hawkeye Pierce, than I do in those I know I will never know completely--or complexly, probably--like my mother or my best friend.  And that should worry me.

It's a strange place to be when I start aspiring to know my friends like I know the people at the 4077th.

Hello, everyone!

An introduction is probably in order, isn't it?

I've wanted to blog for some time, but I've never felt that I had anything of use to talk about, save the random stuff I talk about on Twitter. But that's just Twitter for you.  I always felt like if I was going to have a blog and call it a blog, I'd best have something that was worth hearing about. I feel like I have something now. You decide.

First things first, I'm a creative writing undergrad in my senior year, which hopefully means I'll graduate this year.  I'm looking at December with starry eyes right now.  That kind of freaks me out.  Expect to hear a lot about adventures in thesis writing in this blog, as well as adventures in looking for a grad school.  I don't have any commitments towards any particular grad school right now.  I just know I want to get my master's degree.

My body is 22 years old and I have lived in the same state my entire life.  I don't get to travel much, which feels like it's wounding my soul, because while I do feel at home here with my family and my friends, this state has always felt like it's out of place to me.  I feel like I need to get out and see someplace else, and for more than a week's vacation.  You'll likely hear a lot about my adventures in trying to save money to go on a road trip here, too.  Especially of the "I want to go to New Orleans" nature.  (I've been twice, but I feel like I'm overdue for another visit, especially with my newfound fascination of the culture of the area.)

Most of my traveling is the sort that takes place in my head.  I'm a fiction writer.  Writing is going to likely be what I talk most about in this blog, because it's the most central aspect of my life.  I participate in NaNoWriMo every year, and have since 2005.  I've won the last three years.  My goal this year is to finish the novel my best friend and I have been working on since we were juniors in high school, and with any luck, I'll be ready to charge to the finale in that by the time NaNo rolls around this November.  Said best friend is currently in another state, and she might be for several months.  She might come up in this blog, too.

My biggest motivation in starting a blog right now is the realisation that I'm at a very strange place in my gender identity.  I'm genderqueer, I'm panromantic, I'm a lot of things, and I'll save that talk for another day, one when I'm feeling less like myself.  It's easier to talk about what I'm not when I'm not.  Roleplaying is another huge part of my life, largely because it lets me externalise a lot of my internalised issues with identity. But that's neither here nor there.  The character I'm currently both writing about and playing is someone I've come to identify closely with, someone I think I could easily become.

That's all you need to know for now.  No promises on how often I'll write, or how much when I do.  I tend to be long-winded.  But you probably figured that one out.

Call me Saturday.