Things have happened in the last few months.
One: I've started to be really comfortable with calling myself 'trans' more than 'queer', which I think is a real step forward, because it's more...me. I'm still queer. And I'll still be genderqueer even if I do transition--it's possible, I've decided (discovered?) to be FtM and still be genderqueer. So I'm thinking of myself now as transmasculine, if not quite a transman. It fits. And I'm okay with this.
Two: Because of this, I've started going out in public in boy-mode lately. Not all the time, because it's Arkansas, and it's summer, and it's damn hot to bind all the time, but enough. I'm okay with it. I'm not freaked about binding and even packing in public. I'm starting to buy more boy clothes for occasions like this. I bought a nice short-sleeve plaid button down the other day that'll be much more comfortable in the summer than a long-sleeve with the sleeves rolled up. I think I'm gonna go get a pair of khaki cargo shorts soon, too, to go with it. Which is kind of a big deal for me; I haven't worn shorts in years. Mostly because I don't shave my legs, and I'm self-conscious about it because I'm still publicly female and therefore still expected to shave. That said...I think it'll help me pass if I do decide to wear shorts. I'm getting some swim trunks, too. And, obviously, a women's swim tank, but that's mostly because it's necessary. The swim shorts have me stupidly excited, though. The clothing and the binding and the presenting as a boy has been really freeing.
Three: My Bunnie, my bestest bestie, is now officially my girlfriend. This happened a couple of weeks ago, but hell. I've been busy. Anyway. She told me on the phone one night--and yes, she's still away, still not home, but it's okay--that she's figured out in all this time away from me that she really is in love with me. And we're already planning our wedding, which really, we might as well have been doing all along.
So that's my update on life right now. I'm settling into my identity and excited about being officially in a relationship. Next step is probably realising that this apparently makes me a straight man, which I find hilarious in so many ways. Of all the things I never thought I would grow up to be.
Showing posts with label i'm having too much fun. Show all posts
Showing posts with label i'm having too much fun. Show all posts
Sunday, June 27, 2010
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Emotional Involvement in Fictional Headspaces
The longer I go on playing Taylor in this Vampire: the Requiem game, the stranger it gets, because the deeper in character I get. Slipping into the accent and the swagger. Developing the laugh and the grin. Finding the right subtleties of expression. All the actions and reactions, all the phrasings and witticisms, the quirks and neuroses, the delusions and derangements. Loving and hating all the right people. Bringing it all together and being unafraid to let it out. It's an art I'm still learning, and one I'm not sure I'd be good at in a professional capacity.
But I think there comes a point when one goes beyond acting.
Maybe I'm just discovering what method acting is indirectly, which I suspect is the case, and it's how I explain what I'm doing to people who don't get the concept of roleplay, anyway. It's improv. It's me getting into character and not getting out. (I'm finding I'm having a harder and harder time getting out of character lately, but that's probably because I'm in so deep in the first place.) It really is a lot of fun, and I always love the opportunity to stop being me for a little while.
But it kind of worries me sometimes when I react in unexpected ways when I'm in character. It means I'm in the headspace of someone I don't fully understand, and that never fails to catch me off-guard. The character is in my head, fully formed, and we're suddenly switching places and I don't know my way around in theirs as well as they do in mine. It normally doesn't bother me that much, because it just means I'll be writing and go "oh, hey, I didn't know that about this character," and I'll keep writing. But in roleplay...it means that someone can say a passing word that falls like a rock in my stomach, or I'll start shaking, or I'll start laughing, and it feels like I'm not entirely the one in control, because I don't know why this is happening. It's the character fully taking over.
Tonight at roleplay, the final act of the game was that my character was handed an envelope, presumably from the woman who is basically out to kill him. In the envelope was a picture of this woman torturing the girl I had just slept with the night before--someone who reminded me far too much of the woman who had been the mother of my child, my baby girl. (You see me slipping into first person here.) Now, what startled me about this is the fact that when our storyteller described to me what was in the envelope, in very simple straightforward terms--no description of the torture, no real description at all, in fact, I'm only assuming that she was being tortured, because I have no idea--I felt as though someone had poisoned me. Lightheaded, stomach knotting, knees weak. I felt the colour drain from my skin. My hands started shaking. I had to sit down. I did not know Taylor would react that way. This girl...the one I'd slept with, and the one I'd been with way back when (before I was a vampire), I thought they didn't mean anything to him. Not much. I didn't realise he was so tied up around this girl. And now I'm wondering if she really left him, or if maybe she died. Or was killed. Taylor won't tell me. Or he doesn't remember, one, but it still is a little disturbing to me that I'm having this powerful physical reaction in character when he obviously would expect to react this way in this situation and I don't. And I couldn't shake the feeling after I got out of character, which is kind of strange.
The point of all this is that I was entirely too in-character tonight for it to be healthy, probably.
Mind, this is all vampire!Taylor. The Taylor I speak about in the canon (the one where he's not a vampire) is a different person than vampire!Taylor is becoming. Which in itself is odd to me. Even Dameon didn't change this much when I played him as a werewolf. Then again, I did give this version of Taylor a much more traumatic backstory. That's probably all it is.
I don't know. I have a headache from roleplay tonight. And I love the storyteller for doing this to me, it's great, I like tormenting my characters, don't get me wrong. It just throws me off when they're so deeply affected by things that I did not know would screw with my head this much. The sacrifices we make for our art, really. Or the bizarre twists of a game.
But I think there comes a point when one goes beyond acting.
Maybe I'm just discovering what method acting is indirectly, which I suspect is the case, and it's how I explain what I'm doing to people who don't get the concept of roleplay, anyway. It's improv. It's me getting into character and not getting out. (I'm finding I'm having a harder and harder time getting out of character lately, but that's probably because I'm in so deep in the first place.) It really is a lot of fun, and I always love the opportunity to stop being me for a little while.
But it kind of worries me sometimes when I react in unexpected ways when I'm in character. It means I'm in the headspace of someone I don't fully understand, and that never fails to catch me off-guard. The character is in my head, fully formed, and we're suddenly switching places and I don't know my way around in theirs as well as they do in mine. It normally doesn't bother me that much, because it just means I'll be writing and go "oh, hey, I didn't know that about this character," and I'll keep writing. But in roleplay...it means that someone can say a passing word that falls like a rock in my stomach, or I'll start shaking, or I'll start laughing, and it feels like I'm not entirely the one in control, because I don't know why this is happening. It's the character fully taking over.
Tonight at roleplay, the final act of the game was that my character was handed an envelope, presumably from the woman who is basically out to kill him. In the envelope was a picture of this woman torturing the girl I had just slept with the night before--someone who reminded me far too much of the woman who had been the mother of my child, my baby girl. (You see me slipping into first person here.) Now, what startled me about this is the fact that when our storyteller described to me what was in the envelope, in very simple straightforward terms--no description of the torture, no real description at all, in fact, I'm only assuming that she was being tortured, because I have no idea--I felt as though someone had poisoned me. Lightheaded, stomach knotting, knees weak. I felt the colour drain from my skin. My hands started shaking. I had to sit down. I did not know Taylor would react that way. This girl...the one I'd slept with, and the one I'd been with way back when (before I was a vampire), I thought they didn't mean anything to him. Not much. I didn't realise he was so tied up around this girl. And now I'm wondering if she really left him, or if maybe she died. Or was killed. Taylor won't tell me. Or he doesn't remember, one, but it still is a little disturbing to me that I'm having this powerful physical reaction in character when he obviously would expect to react this way in this situation and I don't. And I couldn't shake the feeling after I got out of character, which is kind of strange.
The point of all this is that I was entirely too in-character tonight for it to be healthy, probably.
Mind, this is all vampire!Taylor. The Taylor I speak about in the canon (the one where he's not a vampire) is a different person than vampire!Taylor is becoming. Which in itself is odd to me. Even Dameon didn't change this much when I played him as a werewolf. Then again, I did give this version of Taylor a much more traumatic backstory. That's probably all it is.
I don't know. I have a headache from roleplay tonight. And I love the storyteller for doing this to me, it's great, I like tormenting my characters, don't get me wrong. It just throws me off when they're so deeply affected by things that I did not know would screw with my head this much. The sacrifices we make for our art, really. Or the bizarre twists of a game.
Saturday, February 6, 2010
This is why writing workshops are entertaining.
I'm taking two different fiction courses this semester--a forms class, and a workshop class. The piece I submitted for the former earlier this week was a first-preson narrative in which the identity of the speaker was never clearly marked. My intent in writing this was to obfuscate the gender of the speaker. Call it an experiment. The story was about my speaker's very sexually geared relationship with a young man named Dylan. Part of my intent was to see whether the class interpreted the speaker as male or female.
Of course, it doesn't matter either way, because my speaker was Taylor, who is both intersexed and gender-neutral.
(That was fun to explain, because the guy sitting next to me was asking "yeah, but how often does that happen? Like one in a billion?" Not that I have much respect for this guy anyway. I was happy to hear the girl on the other side of him comment that it happens "more often than you may think".)
Most of the class interpreted my speaker as female. Now, part of this could be due to the writer=narrator fallacy, which in a class of this level, I'd expect. But I tend to think it was more a matter of that interpretation being heteronormative. Two people, the professor included, read my speaker as male, which is closer to reality, since Taylor mostly presents as male. One read the character as male because of the Fight Club references to "I am Jack's..." which makes sense, since people do tend to refer to the Fight Club narrator as Jack because of these lines. The professor read the character as male because he didn't think a girl would refer to what the two characters were doing as 'fucking'. Which I tend to think of as more of a male phrasing, myself. But it was interesting.
Now, I really can't say why they read it one way or the other, but I just thought it was interesting that they did. And the questions I am left with are these: is it because the other character is male? Is it because the narrator is a submissive? Is it because they know the writer as a female?
Just some random thoughts. Things I probably won't find out the answers to, and I'm probably reading too much into things.
I was just incredibly thrilled that the first thing in my workshop that happened was a rather lengthy argument over whether the narrator was male or female. I'm enjoying breaking down the idea of the binary being so clean-cut and real. I intend to keep playing genderfuckery out in my stories this semester, just for my own entertainment.
Of course, it doesn't matter either way, because my speaker was Taylor, who is both intersexed and gender-neutral.
(That was fun to explain, because the guy sitting next to me was asking "yeah, but how often does that happen? Like one in a billion?" Not that I have much respect for this guy anyway. I was happy to hear the girl on the other side of him comment that it happens "more often than you may think".)
Most of the class interpreted my speaker as female. Now, part of this could be due to the writer=narrator fallacy, which in a class of this level, I'd expect. But I tend to think it was more a matter of that interpretation being heteronormative. Two people, the professor included, read my speaker as male, which is closer to reality, since Taylor mostly presents as male. One read the character as male because of the Fight Club references to "I am Jack's..." which makes sense, since people do tend to refer to the Fight Club narrator as Jack because of these lines. The professor read the character as male because he didn't think a girl would refer to what the two characters were doing as 'fucking'. Which I tend to think of as more of a male phrasing, myself. But it was interesting.
Now, I really can't say why they read it one way or the other, but I just thought it was interesting that they did. And the questions I am left with are these: is it because the other character is male? Is it because the narrator is a submissive? Is it because they know the writer as a female?
Just some random thoughts. Things I probably won't find out the answers to, and I'm probably reading too much into things.
I was just incredibly thrilled that the first thing in my workshop that happened was a rather lengthy argument over whether the narrator was male or female. I'm enjoying breaking down the idea of the binary being so clean-cut and real. I intend to keep playing genderfuckery out in my stories this semester, just for my own entertainment.
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