They’re Here!! They’re Here!!

While I was at a client’s today, Betty got to receive a very large, heavy box full of the new book. This is the first I’ve gotten to see it, so it’s very exciting. It’s a sturdy book, and there’s an artsy typesetting effect that I really love.

Those who have ordered signed copies should get them by the end of the week (unless you live in, say, Australia).

& Just to say: it is something to hold your first book in your hands. It is something else altogether to hold your second.

The Year of Magical Genders

When I started writing She’s Not the Man I Married, I was thinking of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, which made me think about driving up a mountain road in order to see something a ways off, & the way the road curls around the mountain, so that every time you go around a bend you get a slightly different perspective of the thing you’re trying to see.

I think that’s what this book does. I hope so, anyway. That very same aspect of it also makes choosing excerpts to read aloud kind of difficult, as right in the middle of a narrative about one thing I tend to go off on a huge tangent about shoe-buying or faghags or something. It’s thickly layered, in a sense, so that it’s hard to just pull a piece out that doesn’t loose something in the excerpting.

So now that the first review has come up, and the word “repetitive” appeared in it, I can’t say I’m surprised, but I’d argue it wasn’t unnecessary. Ineffective, maybe, but I was doing it for a reason. “Humorous” and “self-deprecating” are much more accurate.

Overfill

All my life, my dreams have used water as one metaphor for anxiety: I might find myself on the top of a very tall wave or under it a moment later, or somehow a room I’m in is filling with water even though the room right next to it isn’t. I don’t know if it’s a typical anxiety metaphor, but it’s always been one of my regulars. (Others include having to keep kittens safe from adult feet crossing a room, and losing teeth.)

But a few months ago my dream metaphors worked their way into my waking life. I found myself worrying all the time that I’d left the tub running. I take a lot of baths so I do run water for a tub pretty regularly, and I’ve certainly had actual near misses where a moment’s more delay would result in some flooding. So in a certain sense my brain caught hold of a regular circumstance that does need attention but blew it out of proportion: first in my dreams, of rooms filling with water, and then in my waking life, with me having panic attacks while out that I’d somehow left the house with the tub running full blast.

For a while I worried I was losing my mind entirely; I’d never had such a constant metaphor for my anxiety in my waking life. Before it was just a general physical response of increased heartrate, a cold sweat, clammy hands – but now it’s as if I have a made-to-order gauge for how anxious I am. Now I know that if I leave the house & panic about the tub, my stress level is high. Sometimes I’ll even have a strong urge to check the tub when I’m sitting at my desk – which is a whopping 10′ away from the tub – if the TV is loud or Betty’s playing music – because I can almost hear the sound of running water under it all.

What’s nice are the times when I have a moment of panic & then realize how long it’s been since the last one, which is what prompted me to write this blog entry. I’ve been calmer than I’d expect what with Betty losing her job & the new book coming out. So today I was surprised to wake up having dreamt about the tub again, and yet – I appreciate my mind keeping in touch, as it were. Because it reminds me it’s time to do yoga, or sit and pet the cats for a while, and otherwise find ways to calm my mind.

& Yes, it is mostly about the book. Once it’s shipping and the first reviews are in, I’ll feel decidedly less nervous about it all. I hope, anyway.

Rah Rah, They Suck

Cheerleaders in upstate New York quit the cheerleading team in droves when they were told the laws in the state made them do something they didn’t want to do.

The thing they didn’t want to do?…. cheer! But the catch was that they had to cheer for the girls’ teams in addition to cheering on the boys’ teams.

I can’t figure out if women are their own worst enemies or if this is about homophobia or if (frankly) they’re just being princesses and don’t want to cheer for less-well-attended events. But no matter what it is, it’s a pretty sucky attitude for a cheerleader to have, no?

(Thanks to Dana at BlogHer for the clever title to this post.)

QueerCents Interview with Jamison Green

A while back, Nina Smith of QueerCents did an interview with me, and later asked me to introduce her to other trans folk who might be willing to talk about personal finance. She talked to Jamison Green, who of course managed to make an interview about personal finance a useful resource on transitioning costs and to articulate clearly the debate about what insurance should cover. I’m not sure how many times they’ll let me join his fan club, at this point, but count me in again.

For that matter, Nina Smith gets huge kudos for going out of her way to get trans issues into her forum.