And this is GOOD news?

And this is GOOD news?

Check out this link to an article at my fave site procon.org. Apparently, our kill rate is ONLY four civilians last year? No more than FOUR civilians, non combatants, are getting killed by American drones powered out of Sierra Vista? Does anybody else see anything wrong with this? Exactly who’s in charge of American war policy these days? This is how I cope best: remembering that there are bigger problems out there than my pain…

I just keep trying…

I’ve been trying to write a post for days now. As soon as the bees in my opera glove get drowsy, and my hand stops hurting a bit, I head for the keyboard. I just start typing, because we all know paragraph one isn’t really paragraph one until the article’s written. But then I realize that although my fingers are still moving, my head has gone blank. I sit back and think, or try to think, and then I realize my hand hurts from typing, and I’ve got nothing worth reading, an empty head and my hand still hurts.

I went to my junk paragraphs bucket looking for inspiration or at least something worth plagiarizing from myself. I even pulled text out of emails, thinking surely I had written something to somebody that was worthy of public display. After the third person’s batch of emails, I realize I am talking about vaping entirely too much. I’ve become an evangelist on the issue. It’s worse than that, really. It’s more akin to the old joke about codependents who buy self-help books for other people. I’m buying vaping kits for people who combust and for whom I care so I’m trying to get them to do something other than cancer sticks or combusting various and sundry substances.

See, I’m rambling. And that’s the best I can dredge up recently. Rambling. So I’ve kept away from posting because I didn’t want to be “seen” rambling. Or is it being “seen” acting less than perfect? Oh, I dunno… But part of this blogging thing for me, anyway, is about transparency. I see people revealing themselves in these pages. In fact, the best one recently is someone named Dead Men Don’t Snore, who “liked” my about entry. Since I can go to the site and check it out so easily from the email, I did. And I found an entry called “New Year, Old Guilt” that was pretty damned moving. I invite you to check it out for some real writing with purpose. The stuff I can usually do but haven’t got a drop of in my head today.

The main thing I liked, besides the fact that it’s well written, was DMDS’s take on guilt. Most of the year, guilt is assuaged by trying to be useful to others. I love that. That’s ME. And the rest of the year, it can just take care of itself. I love that, too. I just wish I could do the same with words. Most of the time I can write, but sometimes I can’t. It makes me crazy when my head is empty. I feel I “should” be able to write. I “should” be able to do all kinds of things. I “should” all over myself. And then I feel guilty, like I “should” for such an offense as being imperfect.

I’ve been typing, writing, putting words down, but I just haven’t been able to string anything together to publish. I can’t just whine so openly yet. I gotta build up to that. I’ve been trying to use blog entries to pull myself up with, but when the weather goes nuts here, I go down. It’s hot in the day, cold at night, except when it’s cold at day and freezing at night and raining. Which it has been recently. So, what happens? I got DOWN.

In general, I have good weeks, bad weeks and bed weeks. This has been a bed week. Rotten. Fucking rotten. Not to whine, just saying. It used to be good, bad and bed MONTHS. So I count my blessings. I had several bad years in a row, and a bed year before that. So I count my blessings often. But I still have good weeks, bad weeks and bed weeks, and it’s been a bed week if ever there was one.

Solid pain in my left arm for about 95% of the time and then there’s sleep. If I get any. Oh, and after a week in bed, all the rest of me hurts, too. I went out to check my mail today, and while I feel better for having moved around, my arm hurt worse just from the act of walking. No, I didn’t do a handstand, I just held it next to my body. But it’s enough on a bed day to wake the bees up and let the monster out of the box or whatever metaphors I’m mixing at the time.

Actually, letting the monster out of the box is the right one for today. It’s like there’s a bad guy or a parasite or an alien or something inside my arm. If I can keep it calm and not use my arm (or my elbow or wrist or hand or shoulder, kinda upper left quadrant) very much, all is pretty well. If I use my arm too much, then the monster gets impatient in the box and starts thrashing around. When a bed week is happening, if I do too much of anything, the monster gets out and runs around all around my body, not just in my arm/neck/jaws areas. Oh no, not limited to anything at all. Just as all inclusive as can be. Ain’t that great?

But today is a success on ONE level at any rate. I managed to post to my blog. No matter what else does or doesn’t happen, I managed to reach out and publish this blog.

Which Way Do I Go?

I was talking to my friend J today about blogging, and I realized what it is that feels so safe here. I am able to present myself truly and without filters here because it’s inherently a truth-telling mechanism. I love that. I have my private life and it stays as private as I need it to. But if my life somehow offers an example that others might find valuable, it’s tremendously empowering to ME that I can present that example openly and without worrying about any kind of rejection.

You, dear reader, may disagree with me. You might openly disagree and leave me a message about which we can converse. But you cannot reject me. You may simply go away if you don’t like what I say. That’s not rejection, that’s choice, and choice is empowering. For example, if you don’t like abortions, don’t have one. That’s your choice and your right. However, it’s beyond your rights, imho (gentlemen), to tell someone ELSE what their choices are. And that is what I have come to see has happened not only to me, but to a LOT of folks in my generation. We were given choices. We weren’t asked questions to find out what we thought, we were told what to think. From the beginning, from pink and blue, all the way up in life, it’s choices between: off and on, left or right, up or down, lots of binary choices… Those are safe ones. Yes or no. No messy maybes in the way…

But what happens if you have a personal awareness that “binary” choices are inherently incomplete? That’s part of my story. I’m a maybe. I’ve always been a maybe. I have dealt with what is now called “gender dysphoria” since I was old enough to perceive myself as a person separate from others. I had a father with a wicked sense of humor, heavily tainted by the sexism and male privilege taught from the cradle in Texas, which is, indeed, “a whole nother country…”, and he thought teasing was a way to make his children strong enough to deal with the outside world. So I was given some strange ideas about how the world was, from the earliest time I can remember.

I was told, at a most formative time, that had my parents not gone to the drive-in the night my mother went into labor, my parents wouldn’t have had to rush to the hospital. While rushing to the hospital, we hit some railroad tracks real hard, and my balls got knocked off (I’m not joking. I still don’t know whether my father was joking or seeing me as the “male” person I had to be if I wasn’t a frilly lil girl). The “joke” goes on, if you can believe it, with the “fact” that my name was going to be Eli, had I not been born a girl. All of this would have been just a bizarre joke had I not already questioned my gender at the age of four when I had the first of many dreams of being a male person. Nothing particularly interesting about the dreams except that I was always a boy or a man, never a girl or a woman. There were other pieces to this puzzle, including the weirdly prophetic “poor lil girl ain’t got but one mama” (later in life, when I identified myself as a lesbian soccer mom, that came floating up from somewhere in my memory.), and the always popular parental temporary tattoo: “sweet” (in ballpoint pen) over one lil pectoral muscle, no mammaries in sight for years to come, and “sour” over the other…

Later in life, much later, I sat at lunch with a friend who suddenly blurts out the question, “Do you have a nickname?” I asked why, never having heard this question so pointedly before. She replied, “your name is so feminine. Surely you don’t go by that name all the time? You must have some nickname that people call you, don’t you?” I didn’t. I had lived with that name for nearly half a century, and I had tried on several occasions when younger to change it, but no one took me seriously. I was forced to stick with that name until someone poked me in the brain and made me think for myself. A month later, I went to court, and changed my name legally to the name I now bear. No man gave it to me, no one assigned it to me, I chose it myself, and it is deliberately a non-genderized name. It’s one both girls and boys are given often, and its a name that means something to me. All three names do. I made sure of it. I renamed myself to fit my view of myself. To hell with the rest of you, this is me, not that, was my thinking. But it didn’t settle the gender thing for me. I still wasn’t a girl or a woman of any kind, yet I certainly did NOT want to climb into that man box and attempt to be THAT kind of person. That didn’t feel any more right to me than my assigned gender did. (I must say, tho, had I been offered a pill, pre-puberty, that allowed me to choose, I’d have different plumbing than I do now… Then, I would most CERTAINLY have chosen the other box!)

One of the positive by products of my life as a “none of the above” (the box I wish I could check instead of male or female) is that I’ve managed to break my societal binary training. I’ve managed to develop an awareness of MORE than yes or no: maybe. Maybe I’m not either one of those. Maybe I’m some other kind of human, not just the run of the mill bipedal humanoid. Maybe the aliens DID leave me here, which I sincerely thought, growing up in the Star Trek years (yeah, the original one, kids…). But MAYBE became more than just a question. It represented a whole other possibility, a hugely undiscovered possibility: the THIRD way. More than left or right: maybe there’s a middle, for example. More than on or off, maybe there’s another setting (sleep mode on pcs). More than a binary world, maybe there IS a world in which people CHOOSE how they present themselves to others, rather than let others tell them how to present properly. Two words sum it up: Picture day. That was the worst day of the year for me. No matter what, I had to leave the house frilled beyond belief by a beloved aunt whose fantasies of having a hair salon were squashed all over her nieces’ heads whether they liked it or not. There are maybe 3 of the 12 photos of my scholastic career in which I resemble the person I actually am, and they are the ones my parents hid and DIDN’T show others. Nice shaming technique then, but I know now they were merely showing their own binary training. Those were pictures of a none of the above person, and that was just not an acceptable presentation. Took me nearly 40 years to get over some of this.

Why do I share this now and in such a potentially public way? Because that is the third way. I will not shoehorn myself into a false personage just to make others comfy, nor will I rub their faces in it (by revealing details about my family — my story is mine, theirs is not). I’m not saying this to make those who fit nicely in their assigned boxes feel bad; I’m saying it so they know they’re lucky to fit the assigned box so nicely, and to be careful for those who do not. I’m not trying to make my parents feel bad; my mother, who passed on some years ago, already knows what she needs to know, and my father and I are working on things. The trouble is, he’s no longer the person who did those weird things to me when I was a child. He’s a different person, too. If I have the right (in fact, the responsibility) to show myself truly for who I am, then I do NOT have the right to deny my father the same. He’s grown, and changed, and in fact, was injured in the incident that surrounded my mother’s death, and he just is not the same person he was before that event. I have no right to influence his world in a negative way, as he had no right to do so with me. But I like to think that if he were an adult father of three today he would do things differently than he did in the 60s in Texas. I think we’d landed on the moon before he really got over Kennedy’s death happening in Texas. It’s not that Kennedy died. It’s not that Kennedy was assassinated. It’s that he was assassinated in TEXAS that upset my father. Real wild set of priorities that man had. But “had” is the operative word. That man is gone, and a tired old geezer sits in his shoes, wondering how to make sense of his eldest child. I cannot let that geezer go unloved into the dark. That tired old man made me who I am today, taught me the values I hold dear, gave me true skills to challenge the world and conquer it with. I have to find a third way to deal with him.

So, J, if you’re still with me, there IS a third way for you as well. The things that get you, the buttons that get pushed, those are the things that propel you onto the “third way” path. What does that mean? I don’t know. It’s your life. It’s your challenge. I just know for a fact that you have more than two alternatives. There IS more than off and on. What that looks like for you, J, for your family, for you, my readers, that’s YOUR path to travel. I assure you, no matter how wild the path, it is YOURS to travel and you alone are in charge. Generally, we are born alone, we die alone, and we alone are responsible for much of what happens along the way. That’s GOOD news. Maybe it feels kinda weird now, but it will lead you to a better place, if you walk with courage in the direction YOU feel led to follow. Good luck to all of you fellow travellers. Please share with me if you feel so inclined. If not, find someone else to read. I’m not the only one who’s spilling their guts on a blog: go find somebody inspiring to you, whatever that means. I hope you continue to read my blog, to find out what my third ways have been, but if not, go in peace and be healthy.

For those interested, I recently learned the difference between combusting and vaping plant matter. If you are a chronic sufferer of some health issue and have medical marijuana available to you, or if you want to leave the damaging part of smoking cigarettes behind, please check out my second blog: vaping4life.wordpress.com. I’ve had profound realizations since I began that path, and I want to share them separately from my own experience. So if you want to learn how to vape and what that means to your supplies of precious expensive mmj, or you want to stop paying the large tobacco companies for free cancer and expensive cigarettes, join me there to find out how to have fun and save money with vaping. Thanks for reading, and I’ll be back as soon as I can with more about the challenges of maybe and finding that third way. Or something. Who knows? I don’t yet. When I do, you’ll read it. Thanks for sticking with me so far.

Just figuring this out

I’m new to blogging. Kinda hard to believe that a gaming pc builder with a 30 year history of writing, teaching writing, biz coaching, and pc work of a number of kinds would find a blog challenging, but hey. Meet me.

I have an agenda with this blog. I’m disabled, so I have a lot of time on my hands. I spend it learning. Most recently, I have learned to vaporize my medical marijuana instead of combusting it. This now occupies a great deal of my interest. It’s the perfect hobby: lots of parts cheap to buy and it saves me money on meds. Plus, as I will be revealing, there are 60+ reasons why a person should be vaping instead of combusting.

I’ve also become a member of the electric car community with my golf cart. It’s been a learning curve on its own, and I intend to share that here. It’s actually very easy to transfer a good deal of your travel to a neighborhood electric vehicle of some sort. The key is, in order to just get in and drive, like in a regular car, you have to automate a couple of the steps of golf cart care. That’s something I intend to share.

I’m certain at some point in time I will go all gooey about a pc game. I’m pretty sure I will be sharing some stuff that has quite literally made me who I am today, whether anyone wants to read it or not. I got some stuff to spill. Kind of exciting. If I can only figure out the interface to this system, I will certainly have more than a few things to share. I invite you to come back every week or so as I explore this new way to share. Thanks for reading this, and I’ll see you soon with info on my current obsession, whatever that may be.