Monday, September 10, 2007

check in

It's just that I haven't been that interested in the internet lately. For a while there- say, a good decade- the internet was kind of my boyfriend, in a pretty intense way. He validated my emotions, gave me room to talk, space to figure stuff out, stuff to think about, and he even got me off. But lately, not so much. Maybe it's because I've had a real-life girlfriend I feel comfortable talking to about the stuff I used to secretly need to turn to the internet for, like specifically gender stuff, queer stuff, kink stuff, insecurities, all that. Other stuff. Or maybe I'm just burned out on staring at screens.

It's stupid though. It's frustrating! I have been looking around this ol internet, its emptry electronic alleys and parking lots, expecting to feel empowered and excited the way I did a long time ago. But I don't. It's a habit: I look at strap-on and just feel kind of sad; I look at trueselves and I just want to yell at everybody; internet news always feels biased or pointless or, at best, masturbatory. All I care about is bookslut's blog, which i stare at the screen, refreshing, and livejournal, which is the most navel-gazey place on the internet.

I mean, I know, right? I've spent a long, long time staring at my bellybutton on livejournal. I still post silly bullshit on that thing, but it's like... this is what I'm spending my time doing?

I've been playing a lot more guitar. Have I ever told you about how bad I am at writing songs? I write most of a song pretty much every day, decide it's stupid, get mad at it, and forget it. I'm an awful singer- I'm learning other people's songs, how to do the strum-and-holler thing I always felt like I was too smart to have to do (I'll just skip straight to being in the Smashing Pumpkins, I always assumed).

Wait, I lost the point. Here's where I was going: I started this blog with the idea that I'd talk about grownup things here. Gender stuff, book stuff, activisty stuff. But I kinda don't even care to do that, and ALSO I just started this blog, which is a trans news blog whose point is to be critical of the way trans news is presented by the media, but I also don't want to do that.

You know the thing where trans women fade out of internet visibility, out of the scene, as it were? I am getting that so bad right now. Which is fine, and I've always ALWAYS said hey man, I don't judge anybody for doing that, because it happens so often I bet it'll happen to me, I'll just want to bail too. The problem is this: I was elected head organizer of Camp Trans this year. I've been involved in trans communities for so long that I can see the role the internet plays in organizing, how valuable a trans news site could be, if it weren't smug, and weren't sucking up to anybody, and were run by smart people with intelligent critiques. It's just that feeling like I have any perspective on this stuff, and power to change it, is arriving contemporaneously with some pretty intense burnout.

I know. We've been here before and it's boring.

I'm just sayin, I don't know what to do. I want to live my life, cook goulash for my friends, play in a band, have people stay at my house, read books and hump my girlfriend. I feel like that's enough to juggle, right? I want to do that stuff and not worry about it, but I've got this urge to make sure that everybody knows that I'm some normal boring girl with a brilliant, normal, boring, amazing queer life. Making sure the whole world knows my life is great, it feels like an obligation- mostly, probably, because the whole world told me for so long that if I was trans, queer, disinterested in a money money job, punkish, that my life COULDN'T be this good. You know? I kind of want to yell at everybody 'you are stupid for making me feel insecure about my priorities.'

I know- and I'm practically thirty.

My point is just that I'm tired of feeling like I have to holler about shit all the time. Whenever there's an article on the internet about Michfest, I wish I didn't feel like I needed to educate the shit out of everyone present; whenever somebody says, 'yeah, being a high school teacher's great, but maybe one day you'll be a college professor,' I'm tired of feeling like I need to say something.

So whatever, is all I'm saying. 'Cause I'm nervous that, if somebody looks at this and sees that I haven't written anything in a week and a half, they'll think nothing's going on. It's the opposite- if I'm not on the internet, I'm almost certainly doing something better. That's all I'm sayin.






Oh, happy September 11th in a couple hours. Can we make it a thing where everybody tries to have really gross kinky sex on September 11th?

3 comments:

Alma said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anonymous said...

to the last part? check.

Anonymous said...

on september 11th a friend of mine in arizona was having sex. real dirty sex. i take her word on the dirty part. so yeah. sex. for the first time in five years. she had often remarked that on the day she had sex again the world would end or some terrible calamity would strike it at the very least.

after they were through they turned on the television and guess what they saw? yeah, pretty much. she used to ride rodeo. somewhere over six feet, long raid hair, scorpeo rodeo rider whose orgasms are somehow linked to great tragedy.

she approves of your plan.