Untitled Rant

I don’t have a title for this post yet. I’m hoping that, by the end, one comes to me.

It’s been a busy couple of months. Rhett was finally released to go back to work yesterday (he’s still alive, and only needed medication, thank God). Baseball season is upon us. We’re coaches this year – Sharkman is in Minors and it’s a lot more work and more of a time commitment than I anticipated! One hour of practice for the kids means at least two hours for the adults in charge; you can translate what that means for the Saturday two hour practices we run every week! I’m still working in the same place. Mixed blessing, that job. I love what I do, but I hate how I have to do it. If that makes any kind of sense at all.

Construction workers, baseball players, coaches, and truck drivers.

Which leaves me, as usual, as the token girl in a sea of testosterone.

I don’t mind it. I love my boys; I choose to work in male-dominant fields. I pays my money, I takes my choices. I mean, I know how this works.

It means that, when I go to work, if I have a problem with someone, it’s going to be because I’m on the rag. It means that, when I’m having a bad day, it’s because of my boobs before it’s because of something going on in my life. It means that, when I speak up and speak loudly, I’m a bitch, not a person with a concern.

It means that I am taken less seriously, that I have to work harder to prove myself, that I have to prove myself over and over again.

I know all of these things and I accept them. So I have no excuse to whine about them when they start getting on my nerves.

But then there’s the fact that, when I spend this much time in Testosterone Land, I start pulling this kind of crap on myself.

I start dismissing my own feelings. Instead of saying, “I think you’re acting like an ass because,” I say “I’m just acting like a girl.” Instead of talking about how I reacted to x or y or z, I shove it aside and keep going. When someone asks me what’s wrong, I brush it off.

I’m a genius at fitting in with the boys. To the point that I internalize their attitudes towards women and apply all that societal garbage to myself.

When a guy (whatever gender origin or identity they claim) is in a shitty mood, they’re just in a shitty mood. But if a girl is in a shitty mood, it’s because of something to do with her gender/hormones and not really a “real” mood at all.

I fucking hate that.

Never did come up with a title.

I hate that I feel apologetic for being stressed out, or tired, or getting my feelings hurt. I hate that I am always the peacekeeper, the one who reaches out to smooth things over, that I can’t just let it lie and feel validated in my own responses. I hate that I feel like I’m not allowed to be angry or sad or scared on my own. I mean, it’s not like I don’t have reason to feel those things.

But what I really hate is that it is somehow socially acceptable for me to blame myself for my reactions, while my reactions themselves aren’t acceptable at all. Don’t get me wrong; the stereotypes exist for a reason. There are some crazy bitches out there. I deal with them every day. And don’t let’s forget that I dated women, so I know all about that.

But I’m not a crazy bitch. I’m a perfectly sane human being with emotional reactions just like everyone else. Mine don’t manifest as often, maybe, but they’re there. They’re not there because I’m producing extra estrogen that day. It’s not my time of the month. My life, just like everybody else’s, is no fucking joke. It’s hard and it’s scary and there’s a lot going on and a lot to keep track of and juggle.

It drives me nuts that I have to tell myself that so that I don’t apologize for being less than cheerful and optimistic and gung-ho about getting out of bed every fucking day.

I want to be able to have a good, old-fashioned temper tantrum without it being assigned to my gender. By me or anybody else.

Is that so goddamn unreasonable?

Discordant

1. being at variance; disagreeing; incongruous: discordant opinions.
2. disagreeable to the ear; dissonant; harsh.

I like the first definition: being at variance. It’s not positive or negative, it’s just at variance. That feels good. It feels accurate.

I am at variance in several places in my life right now. It’s like working on a puzzle. That great big field of blue sky that has 1,428 of the 5,000 pieces, and there’s that one blue piece that really should go there but just won’t snap in…

Good metaphor. I’m good at coming up with metaphors for my life. Maybe not so good at carrying them to their logical conclusion. But hell, they’re literary devices. What do they really solve?

I’m not writing with a purpose this morning. I’m just writing. My mood swings are bad, still, but I know that writing helps. It centers me to tap away at my keyboard, even with no goal or topic or point in sight. I’ve started taking this supplement stuff that my mother came across. I pooh-poohed it at first (I have an unfortunate tendency to do that with her), but a couple weeks have made me a believer. I have to take it kind of selectively; it’s got a moderately icky side effect of tearing up my guts and leaving me stuck in the bathroom. It also can make me more jittery than 12 cups of Kona coffee. But on bluesy mornings, it helps. On sleepy mornings, it helps.

Kind of a natural upper, if you will.

I’ve been talking to my wonderful husband more about all of this, too. Honestly, I’m kind of surprised he hasn’t just slapped me into a rubber room by now, but there you go. He has the patience of a saint. It’s terrifying to go digging around in my past, my psyche, and my deepestdarkest places with him.

Still.

You’d think three years of friendship and almost two years of marriage would have cured me of those nerves, but nope. I’m still a big ol’ coward.

He asked, a week or so ago, why all of a sudden I’m pushing so hard about taking pills and talking through the old cycles and spending so much time on fingerpainting with my feelings. It’s a fair question. I’m not exactly the type to go all woo.

I am, though, the type to do hours of reading and research and considering when I’ve been slapped with a new label. I want to know exactly what the label means, where it came from, when I “became” that way, if the label fits, where it doesn’t.

I did all of that kind of before I really started talking.

I started piecing together the bigger picture of my patterns of behavior, and didn’t like what I saw.

Since I was 17, I’ve been living on a two year cycle. Every two years, it seems, I burn my life to the ground and start over.

Our second anniversary is coming up.

Eeep.

And I can feel the spiral getting faster, crazier, more extreme.

Double eeep.

I’m so scared. I’m so afraid that I won’t be able to head off this go-round of crazy emotional pyromania. I’m terrified that the crazy will hurt him, hurt our life together, do some kind of damage that we can’t come back from, and that I’ll lose him.

I want, so much, this life we have been building together. I want to be happy, to be still, to be normal. I want the ups and downs and sideways moments to smooth out. Never in my life have I even considered medication (why would I need to be medicated? I’m just fine dammit) but now I’m looking at pills. I’ve talked to a pshrink voluntarily (also a first). I chickened out of the making appointment part, but I did the intake.

That’s huge, just let me tell you that.

I’ve had relationships that lasted through the two year cycle, but they weren’t happy ones. And, in looking back, I see where the first two year break happened, both times. Those relationships never recovered. I never came all the way back into them after I got lost in the mean reds.

I made Rhett promise me, the other day, that even if I lost it, he wouldn’t go away. I need him to pull me back in. I need a lifeguard, and I have to ask the people I trust most to do that for me. Not because I’m not a good person (fear) or because I’m somehow incapable of normal emotion (fear) or because I’m just too selfish to make real life work (fear) but because this chemical mix in my brain sometimes just hits the vinegar-plus-baking-soda stage.

Everything about this process is rooted in fear. It sucks.

My hope is that, because I know so much more about my brain and patterns now, I’ll live through this a little more gracefully than maybe I have done in the past. I know what works for me. I know what makes me stable.

I know that exercise is the best possible thing I can do for myself. Even just going for a walk every day.

I know that an absolutely rigid regular schedule is the second best thing I can do. Going to sleep at the same time and getting up at the same time every single day. Doing X, Y, and Z in the exact same order every single morning. Spending hour 1 at task A, hour 2 at task B.

I know that, for the next couple of months, I’ll need to say less of what I’m feeling and more of what I’m thinking. My feelings get… inaccurate. That seems like an odd thing to think, but it’s completely true. I get overreactive emotionally. Think of it like an overdose of total chick syndrome. It’s like I make up for the other 20 months in between where I don’t act much like a girl at all.

These are the things I know I need to do. Actually doing them for myself is difficult. I think I am at the point in my life where I’m going to have to enlist outside help to get these things accomplished, and that terrifies me, too. I don’t like not being in control, so asking other people to help “control” me feels weak, and uncomfortable, and generally icky. That takes a lot of trust.

I’m not good with the trust.

I did mention that I don’t really have a point this morning, yes?

I need to stop babbling now. I have a house to clean because a chaos-free environment helps me keep a chaos-free head. Wish me luck.

Viability

Every so often, the subject of femme invisibility rears up in the online circles of gender theory and debate and becomes hotly discussed and debated again.

It seems that The Huffington Post has the F.I. argument swirling again in recent days (weeks?), with both Megan Evans and Sasha Lotrian weighing in on the matter. And both of these ladies make valid points, and frame logical questions and challenges to the discussion.

But. Of course, I have a but.

I have to say that my life, my relationship with a transguy, my geographic location, and even, yes, *gasp* my age have had their influence on my attitude toward invisibility. Do I think it’s still an issue? Yeah. Do I think that being invisible sucks? Definitely. Do I think it’s something that every femme lesbian deals with, and even struggles with? Of course I do.

Do I think that visibility is the biggest factor that women like me have to deal with?

No. Not really. Not anymore.

My need for queer visibility seems to have gone hand in hand with my more militant days. I wanted everyone to know I was a dyke. I needed that recognition, that instant belonging that you get when you’re recognized as being part of a community.

Now, I don’t think it’s invisibility that’s my biggest issue. I think it’s inviability. And no, I don’t know if that’s really a word, but whatever. It flows.

My problem at this point in my life is not that I’m femme. It’s that I’m female. Because being a woman in my current job, in any of my previous jobs, and in the career path I’m working myself back into is kind of a disadvantage. I hear it at least once a week – if I’m concentrating on something or trying to finish something and am not immediately bubbly and perky and engaged, then I must be in a bad mood, or PMSing, or not getting laid, or… (fill in the blank).

It’s irritating as fuck, and it’s not something I would ever hear if I had a dick. Because if you’re a guy, and you’re focused on something, you’re just working.

My professional viability, as a woman, is challenged every day. My personal viability as a woman falls under attack frequently, too. I can’t engage in a heated debate because it’s just my hormones getting the better of me. Crying because something is tragic, or beautiful, is because I have boobs. I overanalyze because I’m a girl. I worry and obsess because the estrogen in my system renders me incapable of doing otherwise.

There are some behaviors that are learned as acceptable to each given gender, but not every instance of that behavior is because of gender.

And a lot of the time, we use gender against women (and other women are the worst about it) to invalidate the reality of their experience. We do it to ourselves, too. We add smiley faces to ass-nagging texts even when we’re not joking, because we don’t want to sound like a bitch. We say “I’m sorry, but” before we tell someone they have to do something they don’t want to do. We justify why we need time off during the day to take care of our kids, rather than just saying “I need two hours’ personal time today,” and waiting for a yes or no.

I see it. I hear it. I live it.

Being female is a handicap when you’re trying to be taken seriously.

So do I like being invisible to the larger queer community? Not really. But I’ll live with the invisible, if I could just be taken seriously even around not being seen clearly.

And that’s not something that has anything at all to do with being queer, and everything to do with being a chick.

Blur

Okay, WordPress, I type in “Blur,” and you make the hyperlink read “blu?” The fuck?

Whatever. This is why they give me an Edit button.

“Blu” may not be an invalid description of my day. Let me put it to you in context. The nicest, most helpful person I spoke to all fucking DAY  worked for the Social Goddamn Security Administration.

No, really. You read that right. I promise. You can even read it again.

I’ll wait.

So let me tell you about my afternoon. Because really, the afternoon was the amazingness that was the fucktardary that was my make-up Monday today because I was sick all through my actual Monday.

Wow, that was gross. *ahem* Sorryboutthat.

This afternoon, like every Tuesday, I had a department manager meeting. And this afternoon, like every Tuesday, it took longer than the budgeted hour. Which means that even though my day starts at 6 AM and ends at 3 PM, I’m still at work well after the aforementioned 3 PM. And then, to top that, I have two senior managers (because I am lowly middle management) request my presence after the department manager meeting for “just ten minutes or so, to go over a couple of things.”

I left work at 4fucking20.

Yeah. But we’re allowed no overtime, so it’s a good thing I’m eight hours short on the week due to the infamous sick day yesterday. Which I will have made up in 10 hour days by the end of the pay cycle, I promise.

So this ten minute meeting that really took an hour was all about how when these two senior managers were each individually in charge of my department (one of them 7 years ago, one of them 5 years ago), it ran this way and that way and the other way and ran so much better that way. And how I need to schedule training (which is already on the calendar I emailed them two weeks ago) and this is where I need to start the training. And how my office is disorganized (really? with two new people in a three man staff?) and how it seems like I just need to focus on catching up. (Which I’ve been doing for almost six months now and am within two weeks of goal) and how maybe I should just start working half-days on Sunday to get all this other stuff done.

In short, they kept me an hour after the regular meeting to tell me to do all of the things that I’ve already put into my action plan and started…

Which they would know…

If they ever actually spoke to the senior manager to whom I actually report.

And these people wonder why I so rarely come to them for assistance.

I’ll figure it out my damn self, thanks anyway.

Also, couldn’t I have spent that extra hour, y’know, actually catching up on something?

People like these are the reasons that jokes about the Redundant Department of Redundancy exist.

Have I yet mentioned that this particular job is with a major retailer? Now, I don’t work in actual retail (because who the hell would ever let that happen, I ask you?) but the company is a major retail chain. I’m still learning how to speak retail, but obviously, these particular senior managers are fluent.

As a semi-relevant aside, if you are over 30 and have never worked one day of retail in your life, even as a teenager, it’s not a move I would recommend. Even if you get into it peripherally, like I did. The transition might possibly be life-threatening. To you, and maybe to the other poor schmucks who work there and stomp around on your last frayed nerve. Or maybe that’s just me.

The rest of my lovely day consisted of dealing with my bank, who summarily decided to close my savings account and reopen a checking account in its place. On the day that a federal direct deposit was supposed to hit. Without notifying me, having me sign new signature cards, or even telling me what my new fucking account number is.

And then having a talk with a subordinate who is going through a very personal hell, but is also having very shitty attendance and so is causing me a mini-personal hell with my aforementioned senior managers and my HR department. In direct violation of my personal policy of never dealing with HR if I can help it.

And then having to deal with my mother who, bless her heart, can’t hear the word “bank” without hyperventilating.

And then having to deal with Janus, who is fighting with Sharkman again (still) and so is obviously therefore screaming at me via email about what a horrible parent and person I am.

So, to sum it up, I don’t care if it is hell, high water, flu, or other random plague. I am never calling out on a Monday again.

And that, my kittens, is just motherfucking that.

Third

Son of a bitch, I’m never on time anymore!

January 26 was the third anniversary of TSOC.

dumdeeDUM!

Let’s see. January 26, 2012 was a Thursday. So I worked… and if I’m not mistaken, that was the day three of my jobs in progress came to a screeching halt because of an issue with state permitting. That was the day I called an emergency contractor meeting for this Monday. That was also the day I fired one of my contractors, started seriously training my new guy, and started trying to get my schedule fixed now that I actually have a full staff again. I think that was also the day that Sharkman and Rhett were working on his Citizenship badge, I was overseeing the installation of carpet in the house I grew up in (now our rent house), and deciding whether or not I was going to have a fight with my sister.

So of course I missed it and am posting late. *sigh*

TSOC is three years old. It’s amazing.

It’s also kind of sad and pathetic. There are so many cobwebs and so much dust piled up in my little corner of the internet from this past year of mostly-absence. I miss writing. I miss being a writer. But life and survival and crazy seem to have taken over all my spare time. I don’t think that’s going to improve a whole lot in the immediate future, either.

See, I’m still working full time. Rhett and I are still working on Baby #2. Sharkman’s still in athletics and Cub Scouts. And now I’m studying for the GMAT so that I can apply to schools for my MBA this fall.

This all feels a long way away from my very first day of blogging on WordPress. It’s more than a little surreal to look back at the Januarys I’ve covered in these pages:

January, 2009 – WaterBaby’s cancer diagnosis. Hitting pause on our breakup. Struggling to reconcile femme with lesbian with my attraction to masculine-oriented/identified other. Brought to you, live, from northern New Mexico. Where I was freezing to death.

January, 2010 – WaterBaby’s remission (informal, undiagnosed) and the aftermath of her choice to turn away from medical intervention and feedback. The unpause and finalization of our breakup. Being femme in a small semi-Southern town. Reconciling work with life. Rhett’s reappearance (informal, unannounced). Brought to you, live, from the panhandle of Florida. Where I was freezing to death.

January, 2011 – Dealing with the unceremonious return to my home state, the crumbling of my career, the revival of my career, and learning to celebrate my birthday again. My marriage and its effect on my work/life balance. The most beautiful birthday cake ever. Brought to you, live, from the windy wilds of eastern New Mexico. Where I was freezing to death and Rhett was learning to live with wind chill he hadn’t seen since Alaska.

I didn’t do justice to 2011, and I didn’t do justice to the first month of 2012. In these past months, I’ve been struggling with a nasty funk of depression, interspersed with wild and wooly highs verging on mania that made me irritable, irritating, and downright unpleasant to deal with. I’ve started coming to terms with the cycling of my moods and the fact that the cycling may actually be clinically diagnosable. I’ve started a supplement that seems to be helping with that cycling, and as a result am feeling more human right now than I have since approximately September.

I bought a GMAT study guide and picked a testing date. I settled on the business schools I want to apply to, and a couple of backups.

We put Sharkman in counseling and had our suspicions confirmed; he’s a perfectly normal nine year old boy with a ridiculously advanced vocabulary and emotional intellect.

I got a new job, got promoted, had 100% turnover in my department, and survived the fourth quarter of one hell of an inherited mess. That I’m almost done cleaning up.

I’ve dealt with seventeen cycles of Janus-crazy.

Hell, it seems like I’ve lived an entire lifetime in the last year, much less the last three.

All I know is that it isn’t over, and I’m not done with blogging. I’m moving slow, and I’m not good about getting back here on a regular basis, and in a lot of ways, I’ve stalled out on my personal/emotional development in the midst of the ups and downs and crazy. But TSOC is still mine, and it’s still important to me. I never forget that I have a blog. I never stop making mental notes of things that would make a good story. I never wish I hadn’t started, or feel the need to close it down.

If you’re reading, thanks. Thanks for showing up today, for showing up yesterday, for coming back tomorrow. Thanks for emailing me, texting me, getting to know me, tweeting me, and making room in your head for my thoughts.

Sparkles

Today is my very own personal New Year, people.

That’s right, bitches, it’s my birthday. No, I’m not going to tell you how old I am. Didn’t your momma raise you better than that? I’ll tell you I’m still a 30something, just like I was when I started blogging almost three years ago, but that’s as good as you get from me.

I’ve spent my entire day doing the one thing I absolutely never, ever do – I’ve completely indulged myself all day long. I watched 842 episodes of my latest guilty pleasure, Gossip Girl. I did absolutely no dishes, laundry, or housework of any kind… even though our poor home front looks more like Normandy the morning after D-Day than it does our family’s refuge from the outside world’s crazy. I went and got a mani-pedi, and read 11,000 blog posts and tweets, and ate dinner at one of my favorite-all-my-life restaurants, and put in my beautiful new sapphire earrings (to go with Santa’s amazing sapphire-and-diamond pendant), and did nothing that had anything to do with real life or responsibility all day.

It. Was. Awesome.

In fact, I’m sitting on the couch in my pjs, wallowing in the end of my day, eating a chocolate orange with my feet propped up on my dog. The awesomeness has not yet abated. I wrote for CCL, I responded to approximately 84,000 emails – it’s been an all-Jolie-all-the-time 24 hours.

I also got an amazing dose of reality today in the form of the wonderful people who took the time and energy to send me birthday blessings, wishes, and even just the little acknowledgements that it was my birthday at all. My hubby called me at 11:01 MST, which happens to be 12:01 CST, to get to be the very first person to wish me a happy birthday last night. My dearest, sweetest FFG called me at the, in her words, ass-crack of dawn this morning to sing me a patented Marilyn “happy motherfuckin’ birthday” this morning. My momma texted me not long after, and then repeatedly throughout the day.

My Facebook page frankly exploded with cheer, well-wishers, and random people with whom I graduated high school (and have not, I might add, spoken to since).

This one day, and last year’s birthday, has gone one hell of a long way toward making up for the other 20+ birthdays of my life that taught me to approach this day with a healthy respect… Not to say dread, of course.

So the biggest thanks ever to my wonderful, sweet, amazing husband, who bought me sapphires (again) and took me to dinner and chauffeured me to the salon and waited the two and a half hours it took to make my fingers and toes beautiful. And who gets stuck with Christmas in December, my birthday in January, and Valentine’s Day in February and so very much deserves your sympathy.

He’s quick to point out that he does get a two month break after that, which gives him more than enough time to prepare for Mother’s Day and our anniversary within two weeks of one another in May.

Anywho, Rhett gets all the credit for making it a special week, not just a special day, with my crowning moment and Black Forest cake to come on Saturday. For taking the kid Momma-shopping again, which involves wrangling a 9 year old in a jewelry store. For bubble baths and footrubs and hours of spousal therapy over birthday jitters.

And the rest of you get the credit that’s leftover for making it an absolutely wonderful day. I can’t tell you how much it means to the heartbroken 15 year old Jolie who was fairly convinced that no birthday would ever be magical again.

I love every single one of you. You’re there no matter the silence, no matter the crazy, no matter the family drama or life pressure that brings me down, leaves me wordless, or sends me spiraling into loops of mania that render me babbling for endless paragraphs (much like these).

Thanks for the birthday magic. Thanks for accompanying me into what will be, at the end of the month, my fourth year of blogging on TSOC.

Happy birthday to me, and happy upcoming birthday to TSOC! Stay tuned!