Gone, But Not Forgotten

Before I was conscious, I was communicating.
I knew not what I said, but said what I knew.
Now, remnants of those converstations are being preserved,
Scanning letters from pen-pals, and some men-pals,
Like an archeologist preserving old bones.

The ebb and flow of friends, reduced to just memories.
Emma, Tuomas, Severine, M. Columbier too,
Brian, Melissa, Jana, Holly, I remember you.
Though I was just a passing shadow on your screen of life,
Your words were kept, your friendship never dies.

Sometimes we're rich, and sometimes lean, but sometime inbetween we'll meet again.

Your daily inspiration...

In death, time ceases to have meaning; all laws of physics become irrelevant.

Death is the opposite of time.

What dies? Certainly not the body; it just falls into its constituent parts of water and chemicals. That's just mere transformation, not destruction. What of the mind though?

What dies is merely the identity of the collection of parts we call a person. We enter this world naked, we leave it naked; once we understand who that someone is, death no longer bothers us. Nor does time.

Over-educated, Over-worked, Under-paid and Under-appreciated

My niece is dropping out of school at 15. My friend has two kids- neither one with any high school education. How can I assure someone that an education is important?

That may sound silly coming from me, but consider I've taken 85 courses at three different universities, excelled at nearly all of them, and yet... what do I have to show for it? I can make more money selling my body than I can selling my mind. Not that my body is all that... but that's the point!

So how can I assure someone that an education is important when my own has failed to bear fruit? How can I defend the institution I'm from when I can make more money as a whore?

If not money, then what about culture? Well, I can't relate to my family because they watch network TV sitcoms instead of reading books; education didn't help there either.

The only reason I could come up with was because an education is required to do X. But... what if 23 years later, turns out X really isn't what you want to do?

Two Kinds of Violence...

Did you realize that not all violence is created equal?

The difference between watching violence in a movie and in the news is very subtle, but very, very significant.

Consider watching, say, an explosion, or a car crash...
In a movie, the violence is fake. No one really dies.
But watch the same thing on the news, and you're watching someone die.

There's a difference, and whether or not you can feel it, there's a difference on your soul!

Consider that next time they show an event where someone (or many people) dies over and over and over and over and over and over and over.

Your daily perspective...

You are what you eat... you know this right?

In the same way that the food you consume provides the building blocks your body needs to function (grow, fight germs, heal, etc.) so too does the media you consume provide the building blocks for your mind.

Seriously.

So what's you're media diet? As an example, consider music.

A person who consumes media content rich in classical music will have a different life outlook than one with a diet rich in pop, or rock, or rap, or heavy metal, or even jazz. (I love music; I'm not making value judgments here, just making facts.)

Works for video too. A person who watches too much violence not only becomes more desensitized to it (over-exposure to anything desensitizes) but they, over time, will develop violent tendencies.

Nonsense, you say... I watched Bugs and Daffy cause (and suffer) lots of violence, and it didn't effect me! Well, that wasn't violence, that was humor. Think about it... Pulp fiction is (supposed to be) violent... Bugs Bunny is (supposed to be) funny. When the bomb blows up Mr. Coyote, his face is all blackened and his hair blown back. That's funny. If it showed his guts flying through the air and blood everywhere, that's violent. Family Guy drives this point home in a spoof where Elmer shoots Bugs. Instead of the normal "cartoon violence, " we see graphic images of Bugs writhing in pain, disemboweled, with Elmer standing over him, delivering a final neck break.

I'm uneasy about making violence funny, too. There's just too damn much of it, especially to be used as a vehicle for entertainment. Shrug. Maybe it's just a symptom.

Well, hear me now, believe me later, but it's for the same reason why brainwashing works. Constant, repeated exposure alters behavior.
Constant, repeated exposure alters behavior.
Keep that in mind next time you pan through the TV guide!

Short Attention Span Theatre

I'm a bit shocked at the quickness in which Americans tend to forget, and at the same time (and for the same reasons), concerned about this election turning into Political Pop Idol.

Possible causes?

• Too much media prevents long term retention of any of it.
• The media is hyped (and hyping) uncontrollably
• Americans are so numb, they need actually need the hype to notice/care
• Americans are so hooked on drama, they need to interject it into everyday life

Well, don't forget, you are what you eat!

Plain Jane

Today marks a significant point during my transition: today, I went out with no makeup and plain clothes and was treated like a genetic girl! Yay!!!

To put it in other terms, when I first started trying, I hardly ever passed as genetic girl (GG)... I looked like a boy in girl's clothes. That was over a decade ago.

When I'm done transitioning, I expect to always pass as a GG.

So, today, I'm somewhere between 0% and 100%. Most people now see (and treat) me as a woman, but every now and then someones sees me as a boy (but even then, they still treat me as the woman they first saw! :)

This is new! Just within the past year, I finally started passing as a GG! Before that, if I was ignored, I'd pass, but when scrutinized... no. You can imagine how happy it made me to finally pass under a closer look!

Makeup (until recently) was essential, for I have pale skin and dark hair. But, after nearly two years of laser hair removal treatments, I finally have a 24 hour shelf life!

Also, learning to do my hair helped a lot! (Thanks Judith and the girls at Cortex!)

It honestly makes me as happy to pass as GG as it did finishing my Ph.D.! (It also felt just as traumatic getting there!)

So today I'm still not as confident as I want to be... I don't bring attention to myself yet, but after today, that seems closer than ever!

Music ... Food for the Geek

I'm so excited to have just rediscovered a large library of music (250+ hours) that I have not heard for nearly 20 years! Not just any music, mind you, but music that deeply inspired my own compositional style!

Wanna hear for yourself? Okay, check out the following two links, but don't worry about the graphics or what they are, I'll explain that later... for now, just listen to the music.

• Unreal
• Second Reality

Perhaps an explanation is in order? First some context on the music. Nearly 20 years ago, while in college, I was writing music for video games. This was a significant challenge for me because I was used to composing music using MIDI sequencers and synthesizers. In video games, the computer became the instrument.

Recall that this is before .mp3s and before the comparatively huge resources computers have now... back then, most computer programs were under 1.44Mb (they fit on a floppy disk) and most computers had, if you were lucky, 1/2 Mb of RAM available for everything... the operating system, the program, and the music. A typical mp3 is six times that large!

So, making music on a PC, or making a PC make music, was tricky business! When I started we only had four 'voices' where a voice could be a sampled recording. Again, there wasn't mp3 compression back then, so the samples had to be TINY (and recorded at awful quality) or you wouldn't have enough memory to play it. When I stopped (because grad school got too hard), we had 16-track editors, but again, you didn't have much memory to work with.

That first link above? Just four voices! The second one? Eight.

But what about the video? Have you ever heard of the PC Demo scene? The idea, back then, was to show off the processing power of the mighty 386. Again, this was waaay before today's quad and dual-core Pentiums. Your mobile phone is probably faster now. Amigas were doing it for a while, and they would have parties where groups of kids (programmers) would write these elaborate presentations filled with (then) mind-blowing graphics and animations ... you know ... things never before seen on a computer? That kind of stuff. As a young college student learning advanced math, computer architecture, and assembly programming, I was instantly hooked.

You had to be clued in to find them... this was before the Web. They were mostly European-based parties. And since it was a party, attended by people who were into real-life discos, the music had to rock as well.

It was all incredibly synergistic... listening to that music, watching the computer do animation tricks I'd never seen before, while at the same time gaining the knowledge needed to understand how they were built. It was also my first exposure to Rave/Trance/Dance/Electronica music, and I didn't know what to make of it. I couldn't break it down like songs on the radio because it was mostly effect-based, but I fell in love with it. I searched out every composer in the scene, every demo, and I saved those tiny music files. It was my first data-harvesting experience.

You know I save (and organize) everything digital, right?

So now, nearly 20 years later, imagine my surprise when I realized that the same mp3 player I've been using since that time (Winamp) plays all those files! With its help, I've now taken those 400 songs and turned them into mp3s! Listening to them is like a comforting reunion with an old friend... I'm filled with the energy and joy I once had... before the gender dysphoria set in... before life got complicated.

I can't wait to see the effect that consuming all this music will have on my composing! :)

Send me an email if you want a copy! (Oh, as an example of how tiny the sound files had to be... all 4,543 songs are less than 972 MB as originals; as mp3s, they are 16 GB! That's a 16-to-1 reduction over MP3s, which are themselves 10-to-1 reductions of CD-quality audio!)

Fast food, faster buildings...

I can't keep up! You've heard me complain that all Muncie has is fast-food restaurants, right?

Tell me if this makes sense.

TacoBell builds a new building, three blocks away from their old one. They then close the old one and leave the building decrepit.

Bob Evans does the same thing, but they build their building in the parking lot and then tear town their old one.

Then another TacoBell store on the other side of town does the same thing.

This is what you get if you believe in things like "the economy" ... madness!

And, just for fun...

There is a new restaurant opened up ... on the building it says, "Authentic Mexican," and on the same sign underneath, "We sell Gyros!"

Since when did the Mediterranean become a part of Mexico?

I thank God everyday the only sushi restaurant within 50 miles of me (itself just one mile away) is also the highest quality sushi restaurant I've seen. It's the only place I eat out at in this town.

Trans... not gender! Transcoding! (Resolution #4)

Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.” — Henry David Thoreau

Been going through a lot of old media lately, converting most of it to a common format. At this very second, there's one computer busy burning DVDs to disk (275 down, approx. 200 to go), one computer converting VHS tapes to mpg files (56 down, 18 to go), and one converting paper to jpg files. That's going to take a while. I mean, once the books are done, then there's the sheet music, and then all of the folders and papers from 10th grade through 23rd grade. (I'm not kidding!) That's the easy part... scanning the books is what I'm not looking forward to.

Fortunately, all CDs were converted long ago as was most video and photographs.

Why do this? If not just to simplify my environment and reduce entropy (dissolve it, actually), then think of space... right now what non-digital media I have occupies two bookshelves, a filing cabinet, and three boxes. I could reduce all of that down - with no loss in quality- to something the size of a deck of cards.

I don't even want to think of the work saved in moving just one more time.

It's all part of a larger plan for a happy life:

Step one, eliminate non-essential material goods. Toys, gadgets, knick-knacks, clothes, everything not needed, and everything which doesn't do something in the simplest way.

Step two, digitize personal media.

The result? Light living! It's scary at first, but is freeing at the same time.

In case you're curious, all together, everything will fit on three stackable, 1-terabyte drives, altogether about as large as a shoebox. Not bad for every photo, CD, DVD, book, notebook, VHS tape, cassette, and CD-ROM I've ever owned, ay? Still, I look forward to 10 terabytes in your pocket, or better yet, on a chip! :)

197 DVDs to go...
16 VHS tapes to go...
172 Books to go...
13 years of school notes to go...

My First Day In London; My First Protest

This day in herstory...
My first sightseeing day in London, February 15, 2003. I take the tube from the Queensbury area and alight at the Westminster exit and find myself immersed in the above... and below!

You remember the "Million Man" march on Washington? This was 5 times larger, and I unwittingly popped up from underground right in the middle of it!

My first day outside America, and already I'm an activist!

A Dream Defined (Resolution #7)

I think I got fired today because I'm transgendered. No matter, I was going to quit anyway; they weren't good people. The bad news is that I now don't have a job in Canada, making it harder to get a Visa. (That's why I hadn't quit yet.)

I guess it's no big deal cause the job I had wouldn't have supported living the lifestyle in VC I wanted, and as fate would have it, I had just prior stumbled upon an alternative path that has the potential to realize my fullest dreams there while also capitalizing on all my previous endeavors.

Moreover, it's a path which could lead toward providing a positive role model, not just for other transgendered persons, but for straight folks as well!

Curious?

• Step one: attend the last WSOP circuit event - conveniently held in the state where I live.
• Step two: play in 4 or 5 events, possibly the main event too (if things go very well).
• Step two and 1/2: win enough money to comfortably buy in the WSOP main event + Rio lodging.
• Step three: play in the WSOP final event
  
• Step three point nine: make the final table
• Step four point one: square up debts
  
• Step four point two: help out friends and family
• Step five: move to Vancouver (after staying in Atlanta for a good spell)
• Step six: compose music, write lyrics, produce music
• Step seven: finish my big ideas.
  

Don't you think a transsexual at the 2008 WSOP final table (and therefore on ESPN2 for the next year) might go a long way toward providing a positive image toward alternative genders? At the very least, it would make people think, and that couldn't be all bad!

Quotes from Blaise Pascal

Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him?

In each action we must look beyond the action at our past, present, and future state, and at others whom it affects, and see the relations of all those things. And then we shall be very cautious.

Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.

Too much and too little wine. Give him none, he cannot find truth; give him too much, the same.

There are some who speak well and write badly. For the place and the audience warm them, and draw from their minds more than they think of without that warmth.

Human beings must be known to be loved; but Divine beings must be loved to be known.

Words differently arranged have a different meaning, and meanings differently arranged have different effects.

A trifle consoles us, for a trifle distresses us.

All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.

All of our reasoning ends in surrender to feeling.

As men are not able to fight against death, misery, ignorance, they have taken it into their heads, in order to be happy, not to think of them at all.

Desire and force between them are responsible for all our actions; desire causes our voluntary acts, force our involuntary.

Do you wish people to think well of you? Don't speak well of yourself.

Earnestness is enthusiasm tempered by reason.

Eloquence is a painting of the thoughts.

It is not good to be too free. It is not good to have everything one wants.

Kind words do not cost much. Yet they accomplish much.
Our nature consists in motion; complete rest is death.

Our soul is cast into a body, where it finds number, time, dimension. Thereupon it reasons, and calls this nature necessity, and can believe nothing else.

Since we cannot know all that there is to be known about anything, we ought to know a little about everything.

The sensitivity of men to small matters, and their indifference to great ones, indicates a strange inversion.

The supreme function of reason is to show man that some things are beyond reason.

Time heals griefs and quarrels, for we change and are no longer the same persons. Neither the offender nor the offended are any more themselves.
Blaise Pascal

Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.

We run carelessly to the precipice, after we have put something before us to prevent us seeing it.

I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.

Airline Rates Rise 1000%

One used to be able to fly all over Europe for one pound ($2), sometimes just 49 pence ($1). Now though it seems, Ryan air has done what it wanted to do and has moved on to stage two of it's business: ten pound ($20) flights all over Europe.

Still, it's better than the $200 I have to pay to travel around my region in the US.

(Don't believe me? Visit http://ryanair.com!

Always a traveller...

I just read my old travel diary from when I was 17 and jetting solo to France to spend some time with people I never met. Seemed like a good idea at the time (and in retrospect), but I was too American... I couldn't appreciate where I was and what I was doing, and the effect of being immersed in history and culture while at the same time, not really knowing much about it... well, the effects (along with culture shock) blew away my little mind.

I didn't get on well with my friends (they were all older and did two things: go to the beach (in Normandy) or go to the bar. Sounds ideal, but I was allergic to the Sun, and back then, very, very square. I didn't smoke, drink, or do any drugs at all, (LOL, not that you'd know it now!) and I was so young and high on life, I didn't much care to be around that kind of scene.

So, I ended up staying alone in Paris in a one-star hotel until I ran out of money, then spent a few nights at the airport until I could get a flight home on standby. I nearly got arrested for - I kid you not - playing a synthesizer (through headphones) in the restrooms! Turns out, I was stealing electricity. Who knew?

Looking back on the diary, I now realize that I'm a traveler. I mean, 15 moves in 15 years? And so I begin to look forward to the next trip. As I am (once again) on the verge of being homeless and jobless, I can't help but wonder... where to next?

You know, Eastern thought affirms that we are all travelers, and that the path of constant self-cultivation is a lonely one; yet one that we all must inevitably take if we are to derive true meaning from this existence. The only constant is change, right?

To have come so far... to have so far to go... to still be alone... will I ever cease yearning for stability and companionship? If so, will it be because I've met my soulmate, or because I've found inner peace?

And what does that make me anyway... a traveler who brings with her (in her purse) every important memory of her life? Imagine that... only the clothes on your back, yet contained on a small chip, in vivid detail, every sight, sound, thought, event, award, movie, song you've ever wanted to keep.

Is that the exemplar case of not being held down by material possessions, or is it technology-enabled self delusion, substituting material possessions with digital ones, and if so... does that matter, since it all fits in your pocket?

And what then, if such chip were lost... wouldn't that feel like losing a large part of yourself? (Yes, it would! Imagine losing everything in your home to a fire!) But... I can help to wonder, which inhibits growth more... having possessions or being without? From my experience, the things you own end up owning you... but is that because of their physical mass, or the psychological addictions they create?

My guess is that the physical mass sucks you in, weighs you down like gravity. Since I'm converting everything physical to digital over the next month, I'll keep you posted on the progress!

Not So Perfect

Since Jr. High, I've gotten the highest grade in every class I've taken except for one in high school, two at Michigan State, and two at Georgia Tech. Most people are impressed with the perfect record during my undergraduate years at Ball State, but I want to talk about the imperfect classes.

I got a 'B' in highschool for gym class my senior year. My teacher was Bill Harrell, the head coach of the Men's basketball team... you know, the one immortialized in the movie Hoosiers? He took our school to it's eighth state championship the year before and had, in my view, a disdain toward all non-basketball sports. He lowered my grade because I was doing 'dangerous dives' during our week of swimming. (We played basketball the other 20 weeks.) Although a backward, 1-1/2 sommersault 1-1/2 twists might look like a dangerous dive, I was just practicing my list of dives for the upcoming sectionals.

At Michigan State, I took a class on computer vision that thumped me hard, partly because the class required a knowledge of mathematics that at the time, was beyond majik to me. The follow-up course was more managable, but the math was still just as majikal.

That same year, I took a course on algorithmic graph theory, a real beast of a class, for it taught how to think like a generalized mathematical proof. I was more proud of not failing that class than I was of acing the others!

At Georiga Tech, my first class was one on computer language design. I hadn't yet learned to think in language grammars (word math) and that class was downright painful. The 2nd most painful class ever.

The most painful was an advanced mathematics course at Tech. After two straight weeks of not understanding even 5 minutes of any lecture, I dropped that class like Little Boy. It was an entire course on just one part of one theorem of some mathematician from the 1800s! I must have been on crack when I signed up for it initially.

So what did I learn?

>twirling hair<

Math is hard!

Saved By Simcoe (Resolution #2)

Today was another HUGE milestone day! I'm so excited, for although I am only taking one step, it is a large leap forward on my path to womanhood! Taking hormones can be viewed as just another sign of my commitment, but for me, today, it's so much more. Not only does it provide my body with 'vitamins' that I have been missing, but it brings me closer to female and further from male. I'm going to grow breasts... my body fat will redistribute... my skin will become softer... my hair will become fuller! Moreover, just being able to get a prescription for hormones has been a difficult endeavor, and I'm now indebted to the tranny who came before me through Indy. Let me explain.

While visiting my trannie friends in the SF Bay Area, they gave me enough estrogen and testosterone blockers for 2 1/2 months. (In pill form, they had since moved on to patch form and no longer needed the pills.) The original plan was to take the pills (once I got my life stable and in at least a not unsupportive environment) for a month, and if after that time I still felt like I wanted them, that I still wanted to become female, then I would continue taking them and during the second month, find a doctor who would then prescribe me the proper meds/blood tests, etc.

Well, I started on Oct. 4, 2007, just over two months ago. Unfortunately, I was turned down for even a visit by every endocrinologist around town. Turns out a transgendered person can't just go to a doctor for things sie needs, sie has to first get a psychiatric evaluation FOR TWO YEARS that says you're not insane, because, evidently, you must be insane if you want to change your gender. Oh no! :-/

I was down to my last week's worth of pills and did NOT want to interrupt my transformation, so you can imagine it was a stressful time!

Well, I stumbled across a tranny support board where someone ahead of me on the path recommended a doctor down in Indy that was 'sympathetic' to transgendered needs. Figuring that I'd at least get a referral to a shrink (who also won't accept trans visits w/o a doctor referral) I was at least happy to be making some forward progress.

Imagine my surprise, relief, and and joy when, after consulting with me for nearly an hour, he decided to prescribe hormones! Oh blessed man! He even offered to prescribe anti-depressants (cause most in my position are depressed, and if you didn't notice by earlier posts, I was, but I declined for a few reasons. Why? Well, that's another post. :)

So, I went from despair at the though of regressing, to bliss with a bone-fide prescription (with blood work tests scheduled!) all in one day! YAY!

Funny enough, it turns out, once you have the papers, you can go to Wal-Mart to get the drugs. I didn't (boycotting since 2001), but I did go to Target. It's interesting that the meds for something so exotic (changing your sex) can be gotten at places so common, even in small town America! It's because menopausal women take the estrogen, and the testosterone blockers are useful for certain kinds of prostate cancer. Who knew?

But that's how I feel... like I'm finally freeing my body from the cancer of testosterone... and she feels GREAT!

A Legal Sense of Humour (Resolution #3)

I filled all the paperwork at the courthouse today to legally change my name. YAY! This was a huge milestone!!!

Turns out, there's a lot you have to do (and a lot you have to pay!) In addition to lots of paperwork for the court, you also have to put an ad in the local paper for three weeks announcing the change, and you have to get the fact that you did so certified by the newspaper. You also have to pay the paper for the honor.

But, I did, and I strutted myself down to the paper from the courthouse in my stiletto boots and back again, and I was given a court date to appear in court.

Previously, my longest supporting friend asked me what my new birthday would be, and I didn't know what she meant. I had only just recently picked a new name!

When I got my court date, it was obvious what my new birthday would be... April 1st, 2008!

It seems life (and the court system) is not without a sense of humor!

A Great Start to a Great Year

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

• Resolution #1: Full time Clio; all Clio, all the time.
• Resolution #2: Doctor+Meds (to complete transition)
• Resolution #3: Make it all legal (Birth Certificate, D/L, Passport)
• Resolution #4: Digitize all media (books, DVDs, CDs, VHS tapes, audio tapes, photos, papers)
• Resolution #5: Return to composing
• Resolution #6: Progress on private programs
• Resolution #7: Final table, WSOP
• Resolution #8: Forward progress on all previous resolutions

I didn't have a date this year, and I didn't want to go hang out in a smoky bar, but I did want to do something social so I played in a small (385 people) online poker tournament. The tourney started at 10pm and ended around 3am... I know cause I won! :)

I'll use the money to practice for the WSOP.

A promising start for the new year!

xoxo,
Clio

Worst Christmas Ever

Ever!

My family has a typical Midwestern approach to dealing with problems... ignore them and hope they go away.

Now, my family has gone from not talking about the white elephant in the room to actively insisting it isn't there.

After being obviously out to them for nearly two years, they refuse to call me she, or Clio, despite me looking like I do. Thanks mom! Thanks dad! (I pity them both.)

Worst Christmas Ever!