Archive for the ‘dreams’ Category

Remembering

Thursday, November 26th, 2009

Marking Time

Normally I post about every two weeks.  I held off on posting this time because I wanted to mark time.  Today was Thanksgiving.  A year ago today I was given a rude awakening by someone I loved.  I also had my heart torn from me to which I’m still healing from.  It was important to me to specifically remember this day…this night.

A year ago, Jenn, my ex girlfriend, abruptly broke up with me after what I thought was a beautiful relationship.  She was honest and forthright when she broke it off, and for that I’m thankful.  It didn’t change the hurt, but it was the decent way to do it.  I’ve been thinking a lot about that night for the past year.  It truly changed me.  Suddenly I saw flaws in myself that I found myself shocked that I never saw before.  For that reason, I felt ashamed of myself.  Yes, I know we all have flaws.  It’s just…finding out that you have an ego problem and talk down to people when you hate it when other people do that…it’s like a bad dream.  I only hope that I’ve at least somewhat gotten past that ego.  I don’t want it, and I never want to be that person.

I’m glad Jenn broke up with me for that reason alone.  Now…that aside, I had something happen to me recently that made me think.  Chris and I have been watching How I Met Your Mother lately.  We watched the episode “Slap Bet”, and in it, Neil Patrick Harris’ character talks about what he calls an “O moment”.  By that he means that when you’re dating someone, and they do something that makes you go “Ohhhhh….” and think “yeah, this isn’t going to work.”  For Jenn, realizing my ego existed was her O moment.  She told me so and even referenced the episode of HIMYM during the breakup.  I hadn’t seen the episode at the time.  I found it interesting that I saw the episode about a year after she decided to break if off.

I have a problem with this concept of “O moments”.  Sure we have issues with the people we date, but there should never really be just one thing that does it in, unless it’s something serious, like murder, rape, etc.   She couldn’t a. get passed my ego at the time, b.  ever mention it to me and c. work with me on my own quest to change.  Instead she wanted to just dump me.  To me that says that she wasn’t worth my time.  If she couldn’t accept me at my worst, then she didn’t deserve me at my best.

One year later, I can definitely say I’m over her.  I’m happy that she broke up with me now.  I think it was good for me to learn my faults.  I also think in the long run, I probably wouldn’t have been happy with her.  So it’s all for the best.  I really don’t know when I will date again.  While I may be over Jenn, I still have a lot to work on as far as my own issues go.  I’m sure that will be a life long journey.  I’m in no rush, and being in a smaller city, I don’t have as many opportunities to date.  Who knows, but I’m sure I’ll write about it when it happens.

Day of Rememberance

Yup, lot of remembering in this post.  Last week Friday was the Transgender Day of Remembrance.  I spent the day lecturing at Menomonie High School and UW Stout, both in Menomonie, WI.

At 10:00 am, I was in the auditorium at the High School, and wow…I have never had attendance like that before.  There were 250 some students.  Hands down, that was the smoothest presentation I have given in a long time.  The group was really engaged and asked a lot of questions.  I thought I was going to be intimidated by such a large group, but it wasn’t an issue.  I actually got asked so many questions that I forgot to talk about the film “Transamerica”, which was requested by one of the teachers.  I felt a bit bad about that.  Considering the school has recently had some incidents with bad treatment of LGBT identified students, it sure seems like they are headed in the right direction.  I had about 20 students come up to talk to me right after wards to say thanks and such.  One of them gave me a pride bracelet that they had made for me.  I was not expecting that.  Thank you to the girl that gave me that.  It fits nicely.

UW Stout was also a good time, though the turn out was low.  I can’t say that I’m surprised considering it was a Friday afternoon.  A lot of college students are quick to head for home on Fridays.  Still, for the people that were there, it went very well.  I know some of the things I said really impacted some of the people there.  They came up and told me so afterwards.  I was even asked for my autograph!  That’s never happened before.

That night I also was hosting drop in night at the LGBT Community Center.  We had good conversation.  It was a long day, and I was exhausted by the end of it.  I want to say though, it was an honor to be able to represent the Transgender community on such an important day.  Every year we lose so many to hate and fear.  I only hope that my efforts, and the efforts of all the other trans advocates out there, we can fight that fear and hatred through education and awareness.

Car problems

I had a bit of a scare with my car during the past few weeks.  About two weeks ago, I was leaving work, and suddenly my car wouldn’t start.  I almost drained the battery trying to get it to turn over.  It was odd…and out of the blue.  I had to call Chris to come pick me up.  My car sat in the parking lot for the weekend until I could have it towed.

The mechanic wasn’t sure what it was at first because, surprise, he could start it just fine.  They thought maybe the fuel pump was going.  Upon looking, the fuel filter needed to be changed badly.  So, I got that done, and now it seems to be running fine.  I had one more incident when it wouldn’t start, but since then, no problems.  That’s good because I don’t have the 650 bucks it would cost to fix.

Swords

I know I may have said at one point that I likely wouldn’t go back to fencing, but it looks like I may.  Chris, Josh, and I watched a film called “Reclaiming the Blade”, which talks about the history of swords and their use in fighting.  Specifically it talks about groups today re-learning the historical ways of fighting with them using old manuscripts.  It was fascinating.

Josh didn’t know that there was a fencing group in the Chippewa Valley.  He had no idea that I had learned fencing of sorts in college and had attended a similar group in Milwaukee.  He was so excited because he’s always wanted to learn how to fence.  So, we, as a group, decided that we’re going to start going to the fencing group together starting in January.  It’ll be great to have people to train with and learn with at the same level.  I’m sure there will be many a photo taken, which I will post here.

New Website

Gendeverse is coming along.  It looks like I’m going to go with Drupal, mainly due to its flexibility.  I don’t know what the site will grow into and Wordpress may be too limiting.  I have a logo design done, and I’m working on a site design.  I like the color scheme, and I think it’s going to be quite classy.  My goal is to launch by the new year.

As mentioned in the last post, I talked about a friend that would make a great asset to Genderverse.  If you are following Genderverse on twitter, I put him in charge of that account, and he’s been doing some amazing things.  He is none other than Adam Chernow, and he is teh awesome.  Thanks Adam for being teh awesome.  There couldn’t be a better person to manage the twitter feed for us.

Hollywood

I wish I could use that title to say something like “Yeah, Hollywood called me to talk about movie rights to my life”, but I’m not that amazing.  I wish I was, but I’m not.  Anyway, what I can say is that I have a friend that has followed my blog for years.  She happens to work out in Hollywood as a producer and editor.  She has offered to help me get my career started out there if ever I want it.

How cool is that?!!  I can easily say that it has been my dream to work out there doing films / TV etc.  I remember my mother saying so many times that I put too much of myself out there with this blog, but it has never been a negative thing for me.  It’s only opened doors.  This is one of those that I never would have expected, and it’s totally amazing.

That said, I’m not in any hurry to run out to California.  While it’s a dream, I’m not ready for it yet.  I’m actually in quite a good and comfortable place right now.  I like my job.  I like my living situation.  I like how things are shaping up with my speaking career and advocacy work.  I have plenty of time.  I’m going to ensure that my skills are in shape, and maybe in five years, I’ll move out there.  It’s nice to know I have a plan, and who knows…plans change.  We’ll see what the universe has in store for me.

Giving Thanks

Before I say good night, I want to just say a few things I’m thankful for.  I’m thankful for my family, my friends, my fans, good food, bad jokes, people who laugh at bad jokes, my job, my fellow advocates in the trans community, the interwebs, icanhascheezburger.com, my car still running, having a warm bed to sleep in, life, and love.  There are so many more things I could say, but I’ll leave it at that.  Thanks for reading everyone.

Question of the Blog

What have you experienced in your life that you needed a long time to reflect upon before moving forward?

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Heartbreak, LGBT, Love, Personal Growth, Transgender, dreams, family, friends | 3 Comments »

Hobbies and musings

Friday, June 26th, 2009

I’ve had a crazy busy week.  As I mentioned in the last post, my sister had her baby.  So, the end of last week culminated in me heading back to Milwaukee to visit my nephew.  Saturday I headed down, and Sunday I headed back up.  Upon returning, I had a major freelance project to do.

The project was a tough one.  It wasn’t really the nature of the project that was tough, but more the time frame it had to be done in.  I had all the materials I needed, but I had to digitize, edit, and render everything within an evening.  The following day, I was woken up by a phone call with fixes that had to be done right away.  So, for two days, I was working pretty solidly on one project.  The time crunch made it feel like I was writing a paper for a class the day it was due.  Plus, never fails…when you’re under pressure, that’s when weird errors start happening that have never happened before.  I got Final Cut Pro’s “general error”, “out of memory” error, and had to enter the product serial number something like 3 times.  At one point, the firewire port just stopped working too.  I got it all done on time though.  Nothing like an adventure to keep life interesting!

On a completely unrelated note, we’re having a kitty problem in the house.  Specifically, we’re having a kitty pee problem.  Chris wouldn’t want me to blame Serenity, but let’s face it, it’s Serenity.  She’s had a history of peeing in places other than the cat box, and she’s the only one with that history in the house.  Anyway, she has been peeing on the concrete floor underneath the basement stairs.  Originally there were some small piles of sawdust down there, and she peed on one of them.  It took us a while before we realized that the smell was coming from there.  We just thought that the cat boxes were rank.  Nope!  Cat boxes changed…still a nasty smell. Chris discovered it and did a very good job of cleaning it up.  He has an enzyme spray that neutralizes the scent.

Unfortunately though, Serenity seems to want to pee in that area.  It’s happened twice more since then.  We’re trying some new techniques.  For example, today I sprayed the cat and kitten repellent around the area.  We’ll see if that works.  If you have other suggestions, fire away in the comments.

I had a job interview this week.  It went well, and I’m very excited about it.  I have a second interview this coming week.  I don’t want to jinx anything.  So I’ll leave it at that.  Wish me luck.

I’ve been looking in to starting a new hobby.  Most of my hobbies surround technology, and I’ve decided that I want to learn something that doesn’t deal with tech at all.  I figure it’d be nice to do something by hand.  Working with metal is intriguing to me.  So I’ve started doing research into metal working and blacksmithing.  I know…hard to picture a girl like me doing something like that, but I think it’d be fun.  Plus, it’s a great way to create interesting items, like jewelry, artwork, and so on.  Maybe eventually I could make complex items, like armor or a replica of some historical object.  Today Chris and I went to a local hardware store and looked at prices on tools for it.  It’ll be a little expensive at the beginning, but not terrible.  Hammers, torches, safety equipment, and of course, metal.  I’m going to do a lot of reading on it first, so I don’t make an ass of myself.  Well, I suppose that could still happen even with the reading…;)

There’s no segway into this, but I’ve been having a problem for a week and a half now.  My left ear is slightly plugged.  My car has no air conditioning anymore.  So I have had to drive with the windows down any time I drive.  I woke up the morning after I drove back to Chippewa from Milwaukee, and my left ear was totally plugged up.  I’m really thinking the pressure difference from the window and the four hour freeway drive did something to it.

Since then, I’ve tried a number of remedies.  I’ve swabbed (a lot), tried an ear wax removal kit, candled my ear, tried sudafed at the recommendation of the pharmacist, tried a prescription nasal spray for wax removal, and now I’m trying Mucinex at the recommendation of another pharmacist.  I’ve definitely cleared out the wax build up that was there now, but the blockage remains.  I’m pretty sure it’s behind the ear drum.  So, I’m still stuck with a left ear that sounds like I’m hearing in a tunnel.  It’s really getting annoying.  I’m hoping all this effort starts to have an effect soon.  The one thing I’m going to try yet is flushing with hot water and peroxide.  Here’s hoping!

Early on Thursday morning I had to meet up with the client I was doing the stressful video for just to give them the final.  That meant getting up before 7 am and driving into town.  I sat through a heavy rainstorm with lightning striking all around where I was.  When I got back home, I went back to sleep since I hadn’t gotten much good sleep the few days prior.  It was a good move.

During that extra few hours of sleep, I had some of the best dreams I have had in a long time.  That’s right, I was Wonder Woman.  It was a very long and involved dream with me starting in jail…why, I don’t know.  Still, I managed to escape somehow.  I saved the life of the President, and suddenly I was forgiven for whatever I had been in jail for.  People were applauding me like crazy.  I remember I looked damn good in the costume too.  I know why I took notice of that.  On Wednesday, I tried on my speedo swim suit.  I hadn’t worn it in ages, and I just wanted to see how well it fit me.  Turns out it fits me very well.  I looked damn good in it.  So that translated to me looking damn good in the Wonder Woman costume.

Anyway, I could fly of course, and I remember getting a lot of press attention in the dream.  There was also a point in which Superman appeared.  We fought a battle against some evil robot together.  It was a very fulfilling dream.  I hope I have more like it, and soon.

Lastly, I just want to leave with a mention of Michael Jackson.  I was a huge fan of Michael Jackson back in my early grade school days.  I had the “Bad” album, as well as “Thriller”.  I was all about the music videos and I even had the Moonwalker movie on VHS.  Looking back on it, it was a ridiculous film, but I loved it then.  I know MJ ran into problems and was obviously not your average individual.  Still, I will always remember the music I grew up with that I loved so much.  Thanks Michael for the memories.  Rest in Peace.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Employment, Freelance, cats, dreams | 1 Comment »

Dreaming of wedding bells

Sunday, May 31st, 2009

Dream

Last night I had a dream.  That’s not a huge surprise since I dream regularly and remember most of them.  This dream was special though.  If you possibly missed the title of this post, it was about a wedding…my wedding.

It didn’t start that way though.  You know how dreams change shape as the dream progresses?  This definitely did that.  At first, I was just going to a wedding.  Then, apparently I was a bridesmaid in the wedding.  I ran into my old coworkers from my previous job.  Not sure why they were there, but they were.   Then all of a sudden…it became my wedding.  I was one of the two brides.  Get this…it was an arranged marriage too.  I had never met the other girl.  An arranged lesbian marriage…crazy huh?

My bride was a pretty girl.  She had kind of a sandy blonde or light brown hair.  It was shorter, like a pixie cut.  She was around 5′6″.  I remember having good conversations with her and feeling like I really connected with her.  It wasn’t like that at first, but over time, I really fell in love with her.  I very much remember that feeling of love in my dream because it was pretty strong.  A lot of strange things happened in the dream, like a train of some sort.  I remember a UFO…weird random dream stuff.  She was still constant though.  When the dream was over, I was a little sad.

I may have made a decision to not date again, but that dream really made me long for love like that.  I think perhaps some day…my princess will show up.  I’m not really in a location now that makes finding my true love easy, but that’s ok.  Maybe she’ll just appear at some point.  I’m ok with that.  Good things come to those who wait I guess.

Sick

Chris got sick last weekend.  It was a bit of a cold or flu.  Not sure.  For him it included nasty headaches, a fever, a sore throat, vomiting, and mucus.  I knew with him getting it, I’d likely get it too.  Sure enough, but Wednesday, I had a sore throat too.  It’s been odd though.  I had a light sore throat.  It lasted about a day and a half.  It was never terrible.  I’ve not had a fever.  I’ve never actually felt sick.  My energy level has been normal all week.  I’ve had a little bit more coughing and sneezing, but it’s not been that bad at all.  Today I dealt with a runny nose.  I’ve had no stuffiness problems, and I’ve never felt out of it.  So far, this is the best cold I’ve ever had.  I wish being sick was this light every time.  Still, I hope it goes away soon.

Avatar: the Last Airbender

I know…I know…I’m being a geek talking about an animated series.  Still, Chris and I are big fans.  We’re watching the final season, aka book three: Fire, and it’s just fantastic.  Today we did a six episode marathon, and it was excellent.  The writing of the show has never ceased being impressive.  There’s never a moment where the characters break.  You don’t get gratuitous moments just for the sake of having them.  Everything has a purpose and so far, ever twist and turn has been gripping and beautifully done.  The animation is stellar, and the comedic timing is just pristine.  This series is truly a masterpiece.  It’s unfortunate we’re five episodes from the end.  Like with any good series, it’s sad to say goodbye to characters that you really love.  It’s like saying goodbye to family.  This is a series I need to own.

Car Washing

Chris used a term “we” today in referring to his plan to wash his car.  He was very consistent in doing so.  I assumed he meant that he thought we should clean our cars together.  So we did, and let me tell you, we did a very thorough job.  It included vacuuming, interior surface cleaning, armor all, then an exterior wash,  dry,  window glass cleaning, and a waxing.  Chris’ car is new.  So the wax brought out a beautiful shine.  My car is going on ten years old.  The paint job has dulled due to neglect…what can I say, I’m not much for spending time with my car other than driving.  So I bought some extra strength wax to restore luster to neglected surfaces.  It took a while, but after several coats and some elbow grease, the shine is starting to come back.  It’s going to take a few more washes and deep scrubs to get it back to decent, but it’s on its way.  It was a lot of work, and overall…we probably spent four hours working on it.  Oh…and we managed to burn out Chris’ vacuum.  It was 10 dollars from the Hope Gospel mission…no big loss.  Neat cloud of smoke it produced though.

Website Updates

No surprise the website updates are coming along slower than expected.  I’ve got a bunch of transcendingproductions.com up, but I’m still working on the content.  Plus I have to figure out how I’m going to load the content into the main display portion of the site.  I’m not sure if I want to do it completely dynamically, or if I want to do static pages.  I’m leaning towards static pages that pull from ajax calls.  We’ll see.  Hopefully by the end of the week I’ll have both done.

Dart Board

On a minor note, Chris and I went to a garage sale across the street this week.  Unfortunately, they lied and the garage wasn’t for sale.  However, there were some great deals on other stuff there.  Namely…we found an unused electronic dart board for five dollars.  I was excited! I always wanted a dart board.  Immediately I set about hanging it.  Just to test it, we hung it on a screw that was already in the wall.  I won both games.  Haha.  I’m sure there will be many rematches though.

Anyway, after that, I set about hanging it in a space that doesn’t have a table in the way.  I followed the instructions to a tee.  They said regulation is to have the center of the bullseye at 5′8″ off the ground.  The top screw was to be at 65 and three quarter inches with the bottom screw at 50 inches.  I measured and got it set up just right.  Oddly it seemed a bit low.  So I measured…sure enough, the bullseye was at 4′10″.  It was way off.  I double checked my measurements and they were exact on to the instructions.  So I googled it, and the regulation measurement was right.  The instructions for hanging were ten inches off.  I was so upset!  I e-mailed them to fix the problem.  In the meantime, I had already set the anchors in the wall.  So, I had no choice but to drill new holes and just use the screws alone.  It’s all set now at the regulation height.  What an annoyance those directions were though!

Sleepeh Kittehs

It’s been a regular event since I moved in with Chris to have a kitten cuddle up under the covers with me when I go to sleep.  For the bulk of the duration of me writing this post, I had Scarlet curled up on my chest purring away.  She’s since moved to just next to me by my right leg, and Meat, aka my black kitty, is curled up on the same side just off my hip.  Both are out like a light.  That’s where I should be right now too.  I think I will too.  Sweet dreams everyone.  I hope you have dreams of love and happiness.

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Love, Uncategorized, Web Design, dreams, sick | 1 Comment »