#nondescript tag

[strix-alba]

Out of all of the clothing that I've made in the last few years, these extremely yellow skinny jeans are the ones that get the most consistent compliments from other men. Like, I can basically guarantee that if I'm wearing them out and about/at my job, I will get some random man telling me how much he likes them, be it awe, envy, or camaraderie because he also likes yellow/has yellow pants. It's unexpected and, frankly delightful!

[strix-alba]

my grad school advisor is the only person who uses they/them pronouns for me

I never asked her to do so and no one else around me uses they/them pronouns to refer to me

I think it's her way of acknowledging my relationship with gender is, uh, somewhat astray from the norm, and that that has an impact on the lens through which I do archaeology (and specifically how I wrote my thesis)

and it's not that I mind, I just think it's funny, and I had to explain to another professor in the department that no, I still use he/him pronouns, this is just a [Advisor's Name] thing

[strix-alba]

excuse the sudden deluge of clothing posts, i’m having a wardrobe crisis and trying to figure out what the fuckity i can wear besides tshirts and button-downs

[strix-alba]

what if I changed my name, do you think there would be a point where I would not want to curl up and wither away at the thought of asking people to call me by another, ‘cooler’ name than the one I picked when I was eighteen without a ton of thought

[strix-alba]

*singing anxiously* I posted on facebook to my classmates that actually, I’m non-binary, and he/him pronouns are fine, but please don’t call me male

because it turns out that when we’re doing a lot of discussing positionality as archaeologists, it’s really fucking frustrating to try to talk about gender and be assumed to be a cis man and like

that is not my experience AT ALL

that is not where I’m coming from when I’m analyzing gender AT ALL

and it’s been weighing down on me all semester, and then on Monday we had a class that dealt a lot with unpleasant sexual violence and gender - it wasn’t extremely problematic but it was heavily male-dominated - and it was  e x h a u s t i n g

[strix-alba]

2018 recap yay

2018 has been A Year.

I am finishing it off in the same way that I started: frantically working on grad school applications

I wrote quite a lot of fic in the first half of the year that I’m really proud of!

… and then I wrote almost no fiction for seven months

I’ve written pages and pages of letters and journals, so it’s not like I haven’t been writing at all, it’s just mostly been autobiographical

This year I started going regularly to contra dances and I’ve gotten … not bad?

A paraphrased conversation from a month or so ago:

“I do like dresses, it’s just that I only get to wear them when I go dancing.”

“Oh, is that why you go dancing so much?”

“...Oh. Yeah, kind of, actually.”

Contra dancing is fun and it provides the same sort of interactions that I haven’t had since I quit karate back when I transitioned

I finally got up the courage to visit the karate dojo where I spent over a decade of my life and it’s gone now, there’s a crossfit center there

I started out the year with a weird terror of an acquaintance that my therapist took one look at and was like “have you thought about asking them out?” to which my response at the time was “no it’s not that sort of confusion!” and then later that night I was thinking about it and realized “fuck, maybe it is that sort of confusion”

It turns out that I’m exceptionally good at lying to myself when it comes to Feelings and I’ve just, uh, never noticed before now

anyway, we've been dating for the last six months and I’m really, really happy about it. I'm trying mightily not to talk about them too much because god that's annoying but oh man, friends, I am so excited about my dorky queer triad and I feel incredibly lucky

I realized earlier this year that I have dysphoria-like issues with my chest that I’ve just been pushing away and pushing away, and then I was talking to a friend about dysphoria and realized … that’s not great. So I’ve been trying to make my body feel more like it belongs to me

I haven’t significantly changed my style in years, so I’m trying to do that as more and more of my clothing develops holes in it

I can and did grow a beard and it feels strange sometimes but it makes me feel more at home in my skin when I look in the mirror. I look like myself.

I’m still uncomfortable thinking too much about my chest but I can acknowledge that it’s there, I do indeed have a physical form and it’s not awful I guess

I came out as genderqueer when I was 18 and then promptly switched that identification to “binary male” because otherwise nothing was going to change physically, and then once I’d transitioned I stopped thinking about it until two years ago and it has been a very slow, sideways process of acknowledging that I’m not really comfortable being seen as only one thing. So that’s something that’s been much more present in 2018 than it has been before.

I like having other people use male pronouns for me, have started referring to myself using they/them pronouns, and both of those feel sufficiently neutral for now

Continuing to debate whether or not I want to ask my sibs to refer to me as their older sibling, rather than their older brother. I don’t know how much I care tbh

I got a new job! It's boring and irritating at times but it's easy for me to do, and when I'm done paying for the expensive things I haven't been able to afford, up until this point (hello new contact lenses! hello car maintenance!) I'll have money

I started teaching myself how to embroider and I’m very excited about it

Oh yeah, I started seeing a new therapist in 2018 and she’s been really helpful!

[strix-alba]

hair’n’shit

I am attempting Hipster Scruff because I want to see if I can pull it off. It might be way too annoying, who knows. I’ve been wanting to try for a while anyway. I’m enjoying having long hair that I can do things with now, but pulling it back or into braids makes me look like I have a woman’s head stuck onto the body of a teenage boy, which is uncomfortable. So maybe facial hair will balance that out a bit, and make my face look less overtly feminine.

(And if my body cooperates with my plans, it’ll startle my parents when I visit them in a few weeks! Always a bonus.)

[strix-alba]

transsexual TMI time:

I haven’t shaved in long enough that I have Almost Actual Scruff, and I know I need to shave it off because it’s too thin on my upper lip to look good, but I’ve entered the weird competitive-with-myself zone where I want to keep going to see how long I can stand having facial hair without getting fed up with it. And I’m in a phase of dressing more masculine than I have been in a while, so it would work with what I’ve been wearing.

I’m going traveling from Friday until the Saturday after that; maybe I’ll try again then, and horrify my family when I get to their house to crash after the return flight.