[58/366] trans trifecta

[cosmolinguist]

1. Someone I follow on Mastodon was looking for submissions for a trans zine, and I finally finished mine and sent it off today! I wrote most of it a month ago, kept tweaking it since, couldn't figure out an ending, and today as I was messing around with it again I moved one section to the end, write another paragraph, signed my name, and it was perfect. (Well, no doubt not perfect, but I was really happy with it and excited to send it off.)

The person curating the zine has already said it's "fantastic" and she's really excited to include it.

2. Speaking of my name...right after that, I went to my Langauge Contact seminar, where we discuss this week's reading with long painful pauses. This week, it was a paper by someone named Kossmann, and every time my lecturer said it, it sounded enough to my brain like "Cosmo" that I perked up like we do when we hear our names. So she said "Kossmann wrote..." and my brain had a micro-panic like oh shit! what? what did I do? This must have happened three or four time: her saying the name, me having the same startled reaction every time. It amused me especially because I would not say that I'd understood this paper very well at all. Once kind of the opposite thing happened though; I did manage to answer a question, and in responding to that the lecturer said, "So this is an example of what Kossmann refers to as..." and I was like hell yeah I referred to that, oh no it's not me, damn. I still thought it was me, I was just more smug now that I'd successfully pretended to understand how Parallel Systems Borrowing differs from other kinds of grammatical borrowing.

Of course no one at uni is going to call me Cosmo anyway. But I've really internalized it as "a noise that means me" to the extent that, like, the other day when I heard the word "cosmopolitan" in a podcast, I got all excited. It's really surprised me how quickly and consistently that has happened, especially for a name that I was wary of because I started out feeling like it was a bit of a joke, I didn't have any special calling to it and hadn't spent any time at all in choosing it. And yet!

3. After weeks of failing to measure myself and asking questions and wondering what compromise color to get since they didn't have the ones I liked in the style I was recommended, I ordered a binder last weekend. And it turned up today! I was impressed that the "5-15 day shipping" actually only took five days. I tried it on and wore it out tonight (at the last minute my friend Tas was looking for someone to go to the Bridgewater Hall with her, and Beethoven was a nice excuse to catch up with her), with a shirt that fit much better now. I'm delighted with how comfy it is, for both my body and my brain. I wasn't planning on wearing it every day but now I'm less sure! Maybe the novelty will wear off.

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

Hooray for your developing romance with your new name!

[cosmolinguist]

"Developing romance" is a surprisingly good metaphor. :) When I first came out (to myself as much as anyone else!), my social media was full of random excited thoughts like "I can put Mx. on forms now!" and I got self-conscious about that and said I hoped I wasn't annoying anybody with all this but realizing I was agender felt like having a crush except it was on myself.

[worlds_of_smoke]

♥

[cosmolinguist]

<3

[sir_guinglain]

'Dear Mx Politan...'

[cosmolinguist]

Ha, I was just thinking yesterday how silly Cosmo sounds with my last name, maybe I'll change that too. :)

[silveradept]

It is good to hear that your name sounds correct and excellent.

[cosmolinguist]

It is! What a nice surprise.

[lilysea]

Hooray for comfortable binders! ^_^

[cosmolinguist]

I had always heard horror stories about them and, like, I worried mine was a size too big because except for the "sports bra" "bralettes" I've been wearing the last 18 months, this is more comfy than any bra I've ever worn in my life. :)