erratio

This afternoon, D and I watched Mean Girls. Last week when we watched Clueless, and he realized that he had seen that one before after all, I wondered if it was Mean Girls he'd been thinking of as the one he hadn't seen.

I'd only seen it once, I think just after I left high school; definitely a long time ago. (I mostly remembered the "Don't have sex. If you do, you will get chlamydia. And die" line because that's how I've described my own sex ed -- entirely fear/disgust based.)

And apart from all the racism and homophobia and fatphobia I have to expect from a 90s movie (just as I'd been about to go to bed last night, D put Stripes on so I unwisely stayed up to watch the "aaarmy training, sir!" scene because my dad loves it but my god is the rest of that movie sexist racist trash now in a way I didn't appreciate when I was a teeanger any more than I appreciated how odd the "We're America, we're 10-1 in wars!" line is! (Which is the one??? Which are the ten for that matter?!)

...Anyway. Except for all the stuff I expected, all I could think was See why I thought NO ONE could like being a girl??? It's exaggerated for dramatic effect and sometimes the Plastics have to say out loud things that are usually learned by years of osmosis like "You can't buy a skirt without consulting your peers first" but it's not that exaggerated.

When I was newly out as agender, I wrote about why it took me so long to discern my dislike of being understood to be a woman vs. being understood to be a woman under these conditions.

Sharing this on fedi today, my excellent friend Stel replied:

soooo much to respond to regarding that blog post and how I was nodding along the entire time, but all I have the energy to say right now is that I giggled because when I read "I hate all the ways my assigned gender had been poisoned and booby-trapped and used against me," my brain decided that "being booby-trapped" is a great description of someone who hasn't yet been able to have top surgery. Trapped by boobies!

I giggled too. That's me, I'm booby trapped!

(But only for like two more months, heh.)

After

• the wettest Manchester Pride parade D has marched in (and that's a lot of them!)
• also being the one where we held up big cardboard shapes (on dowels) that were a couple years old now so already a little janky despite a few interventions of strategic duct tape
• a too-brief rest after we got home and I'd stripped off all my wet clothes
• eating some long-overdue lunch at like 3pm
• going back into town even though I'd made us too late for the drag king show we'd talked about seeing
• having to walk halfway into town because the bus was on some weird detour thanks to Pride
• leading us to stopping for a drink at a favorite place of ours before we got to the crowded noisy village
• where D immediately got recognized (it's useful being so distinctive!)
• so we sat down with our drinks (I had my first Delirium Red since we went to Brussels! I wanna go back to Brussels) with her and her girlfriend and had a fun conversation
• them we actually did go into Pride, to the main stage and everything (somewhere I haven't been since 2008 or so, when my them-boyfriend wanted to see The Human League and I thought I was just being dragged along but then went "oh this is a good song..." about every new song they played and I could sing along with knew most of the words too!)
• this time, after hearing the end of some band I've never heard of that D said were big in the 90s or 00s, we were there to hear Esther Ghey, the mother of a trans teenager murdered by other teenagers three years ago, talk about how parents don't get to decide who their children are going to become and that this shouldn't affect the love and support they get. I held it together for some of this bit was crying a lot by the end
• then we went to get some food, thinking we should eat before the last thing on our agenda for this evening, a friend's birthday party
• one the joys of sitting outside is that you might see your friends walk by and flag them down. It was extra good to see them because they spend the parade and associated bits of Pride with a group that was formative to my integration and mental health in a new country but but has since deleted me and D from its circles of concern (and I guess the five or so years since that happened still isn't enough to stop me hurting over it! ah well...) so it was extra nice to have them join us for food

After all that, we got the bus to our friend's place for his birthday only to find that he had to cancel the party. "I'm not feeling well, I think I've been too busy," he told us, which sounds extremely plausible. He said this was the first time he'd ever canceled a party. Welcome to being 47, my friend!

This afternoon I did a work thing that was just hanging out with other disabled people to be filmed for boring staff training purposes.

"Where are you from, young man?"

A question that took me by surprise at the end: I never got to be a young man! But this gentleman is maybe a decade or two older than me.

The first part of the question I have a ready answer for: Minnesota, in the midwest of the USA.

His next question stunned me. "What's the nearest baseball team?"

He's definitely English (he has a very Black Country accent and he's already told me he's come from Wolverhampton today).

I've never been asked this before!!!

I'm so delight to talk about baseball.

Turns out he's a Red Sox and Braves and Tigers fan.

He looked up something on his phone then and said "They lost!" with a theatrical gasp.

I hadn't even checked this morning, I just assume they lose every day and I'm right lately.

turned on Radio 1 just in time to hear Greg say "coming up next, the final Rickie Melvin & Charlie!"

So naturally I had to text D and make sure he was listening. Their show is a favorite of both of ours.

He came downstairs a minute later, and said "I was just going to make sure that you were listening."

Two old men, listening to pop music, swapping stories about what we heard around our meetings and other work the way my mom and her bestie used to catch each other up on their soap operas...

In the first twenty minutes, I gasped out loud like I was in a drawing room where the murderer has just been annoucned, I yelled at the radio, I cackled so loudly that I'm amazed neither of the others next door said anything about it....

Yesterday and today at work were extremely deep-work deep-thinking days. (I've been asked to "put together a [public-facing few hundred words usually] for our website about [all of our work in one of the hugest and definitely the most intractable topic in my 4+ years in this job]." I've written fourteen pages of densely informative text and I am still waiting on a section from someone else.) My parasocial relationships with the people on the radio are almost all the company I've had.