Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

I am too full of feelings to work today.

I've been slacking lately, and the work that only I can do is building up. Which is just another thing to stress about.

The feelings today are about seeing the Zillow link for my grandparents' house, now up for sale. Just looking at the photos last night and the little "3d tour" that let me more or less walk around it again...I miss it so much.

And I'm really sad I can't go back to help my aunts (not my mom, who limits her involvement to continual refusals to be involved with this process at all while gripping about it constantly) clear it out.

I can so clearly imagine D and I flying back, him renting a car again, and just spending a few days doing some heavy lifting for my body and no doubt for my emotions too. It feels so plausible and easy. But it's also so distant because it's so impossible.

We're getting toward late summer, a time of year that will never feel right to me without a week of being around corn taller than I am, root beer floats, county fairs, black diamond watermelons, the fluffy summer clouds and the starry summer nights under wide horizons.

And every single time I went back I visited my grandparents' house, the roses next to the garage, the yard where I played so much as a kid... Where we spent every Christmas Eve, the adults playing cards until after midnight. Where we had to stay that summer when my mom was so sick she wasn't allowed to be far from the hospital and then I (6 years old I think) got chicken pox and my brother (who would have been 4) got some kind of intestinal bug and my grandma had to look after all of us. Where I listened to so many baseball games on the radio with my grandpa.

I knew every time I visited might be the last time I'd see my grandparents or then my grandma. But I never thought I'd visit that house for the last time without even knowing it.

I said

I'm finding myself just about able to get through work lately but have no energy left for introspection or feeling my feelings. And I'm getting by but it does add up, I can feel the pressure of all the thinking I haven't been able to do.

I really did not need this. I can't even feel how many levels this is fucking me up on yet. Maybe partly because it feels like I already had such a backlog of stuff in my brain and my body, clogging up the system.

The trans people of the local queer club have been invited to write something to be shared for Trans Day of Remembrance on Wednesday.

Of course I love to jump in and make things all about me but also I'm short on words lately.

We can write about anything but have been offered some prompts that are making me thoughtful:

"What's one thing you'd like cis people to know?"
"What's the best thing about being trans?"
"What was it like to come out?"
"How has your life changed since you came out?"

Of course, I'm probably more likely to write about, oh, the solidarity that is possible between trans people, disabled people and immigrants...or something about bodily autonomy...or about how medical transition seems to thrust a lot of previously-biotypical people into the status of effectively having a long-term health condition and -- while of course there is specific transphobic gatekeeping of medical care -- a lot of what trans people find themselves suddenly suffering from is run-of-the-mill in a system that's maybe okay at dealing with acute illness but not at all with chronic illness.

Okay that's probably too arcane and irrelevant to the situation, heh.

But TDoR makes me think about our bodies and how fragile they can be.

One of the things we ask of baseball is, not to dissociate us from the real world or spare us from it, but to give us a break from the otherwise unrelenting awareness of the gap between how the world is and how we want it to be.

So begins what is possibly my favorite piece of baseball writing this year.

Like a lot of us probably, I've been ruminating a lot lately -- as the U.S. election nears, as the days grow darker and colder, as big and small stresses loom -- on the gap between how the world is and how I want it to be.

Baseball is never worse, though, than when it's shoving that gap right into our faces, making it even more stark and obvious and excruciating than it is while we navigate the rest of our day. Right now, Twins baseball is baseball at its very worst.

So in March I said, about cancelling my autorenewal on the MLB TV subscription, "I'm sure I'll go back to it. I don't think a year without watching or listening to baseball will do my (currently already shitty) mental health any good. But I just need to have a lot of feelings first." But after a half-hearted attempt in May had met with the slightest resistance, I never even regretted it again.

It wasn't quite the dreary year of MLB that I'd predicted -- I worried about the superteams, the boringest kind of teams, coming back in the Dodgers and the Yankees, and while the Yankees were certainly way less fun than last year (when they were briefly below .500 for the first time this millennium and their fans acted like the world was ending), the Dodgers are continuing their inability to keep pitchers healthy and there will be no 100-win teams this season. Of course I'd like to think that with no team winning that many, there's no team that needs to lose that many either -- but the poor White Sox had to show me how far from true that is by being literally the worst team in anything we'd recognize as baseball as she is played today. (That they lost to the Tigers, who went from having barely-more-likelihood of going to the playoffs than those pale hose a month ago, to clinching on that night they beat the White Sox for that record number of losses, is a hell of a thing; it's wild having the Twins be the most boring team in the AL Central this year!).

If that last paragraph didn't make any sense to you, don't worry. The tl;dr is that I ended up feeling pretty justified in saving $150 on not paying for a depressing subscription I wouldn't have gotten much use out of.

Hey I was just showing solidarity with the Twins fans in Minnesota who also couldn't watch the games on TV! That was another really dreary part of this baseball season. The most recent episode of Twins podcast Gleeman and the Geek that I listened to this morning featured the eponymous host saying that they'd had a lot of e-mails from people telling them that this podcast was the only way they'd followed the Twins all year, and I am, no exaggeration, among those. And actually that's felt okay, that has been enough.

Back to the perfect baseball article:

In a way, the Twins are already in the playoffs. You can rebel against the impulse toward despair and rage and resentment, if you want, and embrace the fact that everything we really want out of the postseason is already coming to Target Field over the next few days--at bargain-basement prices, to boot.

What makes the playoffs worth pursuing? Why are they the objective of every fan base and every player? ...It's the raising of the stakes of the game that changes it. It's the brightness of the lights and the national attention and the desperation that makes its way onto the field.... Everything matters. In life, hardly anything feels better than knowing you're doing or witnessing something authentically important, and whereas regular-season baseball is always of negotiable importance, the playoffs matter.

All that vividity and nerve-jangling danger is here. The Twins are a daily story everywhere that baseball is discussed, and they'll play on national TV this Saturday against the Orioles. All that's missing is the bunting on the railings.

(This is where my heart breaks, because this was written on Wednesday and this is Saturday and the Twins already lost that first game against the Orioles which means they are officially out of playoff contention. That takes all the sparkle out of the weekend's games, I probably wouldn't watch them if I could, because it's like watching the last month of Obama being president: our guy(s) can't do much and things are only going to get worse from here.)

But the point still stands! What makes the playoffs fun is that they're meaningful, tense, higher-stakes and widely witnessed. I think this phenomenon will be if anything more familiar to my friends who are soccer-football fans, of teams in leagues that have promotion and relegation. Because people don't just talk about and care about who wins; there is due concern given to the bottom of the league table in a way they wouldn't without relegation.

Last winter, Netflix announced they were doing a documentary following the Boston Red Sox during this season, and hosts of the MLB podcast I listen to were a little bit scornful of this: the Red Sox aren't even that good! Whereas I was intrigued and -- they've had an interesting year, just missing the postseason themselves but even if they hadn't -- I'm more likely to watch that than about, I dunno, the Dodgers season this year.

Success gives worse advice than failure because success doesn't know what worked and doesn't have to think about it that much. Maybe another way of saying this is that happy teams are alike -- (almost) everything is gong like it should! -- but each unhappy team is unhappy in its own way. I can't wait to hear about how the Red Sox are unhappy because I do not know!

Back to the article, which does such a great job of articulating who I think is most at fault with the Twins' 2024 season.

The Pohlad family [owners of the Minnesota Twins] has so methodically demoralized their customer base, there's one other vital, joyous ingredient of playoff baseball missing: the crowd.... In the world I want, we could all melt together into this moment, and Target Field [their home ballpark in Minneapolis] would be full all week, because the Twins have earned this quintet of de facto playoff games--for worse, with this month-plus of harrowing collapse, but also for better, with a summer of tremendous baseball.

The untouchable, disinterested owners of the team have set up everyone below them in the chain of command to fail, and as a result, watching even this quasi-playoff week of baseball isn't off to a fun start. In the world I want, the Pohlads would realize that this is all their fault and try hard to ameliorate the problem in the future. In the world we have, a lot of irrevocable damage is already done, and the mountainous beds of money on which that family luxuriates make them partially unaware of and wholly indifferent to the ways they're making the world worse--including this way.

The list of MLB owners who need to sell their teams into public ownership may encompass all of them if you ask me, but there's no doubt that first on that list is John Fisher who has ripped a team away from Oakland to an uncertain future and no fixed address just because he, inheritor of the Gap fortune, thinks his underpants-gnome level plan will make him some more money.

This has been known and remarked upon for the years that Fisher has been indicating that he doesn't care about Oakland and was happy to move the team even with no idea about what that move would actually entail. So for a long time now, people have been reading him for filth. I'm still thinking about something Joe Sheehan said most of a year ago:

The thing about great wealth is that it allows you to define your own life. The destitute, the poor, the great mass in the middle, even people of moderate or considerable success are all, to one degree or another, dependent upon others. I’ve made a nice little career, and the list of people to whom I’m indebted runs deep into three figures. I’ve been knocked around by industry trends and bad luck and outright malice. I have not had complete control, and I doubt very many of you reading this have, either.

The wealthy, though, the .01%, they can chart their path as they wish, their deep reserves serving as both a battering ram to success and a cushion against failure.

As the final season at the Oakland Coliseum drew to a close this Thursday afternoon (note that the writer starts one paragraph: Thursday felt like a playoff game at 1.5x strength; it's not the standings that make a playoff game, it's the vibe!), if MLB fans have learned anything from Oakland in the past few years, it's that owners add nothing to a team and the teams belong to their fans and their cities (or in the case of the Twins a 4- or 5-state area that falls in to the gravity well of Minneapolis/St. Paul) and we deserve better.

So it's about as close as I can get to saying I've been taking testosterone for a year.

I'm good at remembering dates and numbers and stuff like that (does anyone want to know my kindergarten best friend's birthday? or the phone number for my grandparents who've been dead for two decades?) but I almost made myself forget this one because I didn't want it to be a big thing for me.

( I'm not quite sure why this is, and I do my best thinking in writing, so: )

Anyway I don't really have a point here, but I might start trying to contribute some memories or reflections to the relevant hashtags from my first year of taking testosterone, and from my second one now that that's starting. And I might try to blog about it more too.

D looked over at me and said "It's definitely past the point where your facial hair is longer than your head hair."

I smiled and said "Yeah the barbers are cutting my hair shorter for the summer." Indeed in the photo he'd taken of the three of us yesterday, I said exactly this: I forgot my hair was so short!

"That too," he said.

Because yes, some of the hairs of my wispy chinbeard are getting pretty long. I've noticed this myself because I do like to run my fingers over them, it's such a comforting stim.

I don't know why I'm in the habit of minimizing these transition-related things.

I think, maybe I just tell myself, I'm trying to let my body do what it's gonna do without judgment. Looming large in my mind are the transmascs I know online who've spent a lot of time looking at stuff on YouTube or Reddit or whatever and then being really miserable that their facial hair isn't growing in as quickly as X, or just being enmeshed in a culture of achievement and acquisition over some things that we have very little control over.

Sure you can do voice training and sure specific exercises are probably going to help the muscle groups that most quickly become more obvious. I don't mean "it's pointless to intervene" in any way. But it was a way of thinking that I didn't want anything to do with.

I understand people who are frustrated at not looking sufficiently like their target gender that they get misgendered all the time and stuff. Some of these guys dreaded grocery shopping or running errands or whatever because of how they'd inevitably be treated by strangers. I appreciate I'm privileged there because I can work remotely, rarely interact with strangers, and almost always get gendered correctly (the couple of times colleagues haven't managed it still stick with me, which is a testament to how rare they are).

When someone at trans gym was talking about starting hormones, someone else said "take lots of photos!" and the person said "I will" in a way that made this feel like it was already their plan. I had to wander away; I can't deal with this prospect myself. There's nothing wrong with making or sharing recordings or photos to see how your voice/body is changing over time, but such a methodical approach always repelled me personally. Of course it's not mandatory; there's never only one way to be trans. I think some of the guys I have seen being miserable online feel like this is required though, even when it leads to the kind of comparison that is the thief of joy.

But of course you see and hear about the people recording and sharing their progress. By definition, the kind that don't do that aren't perceptible in the same way.

I wonder if my avoidance of noting the tangible changes that I want and feel good about is maybe because I'm also feeling the weight of all the time that I was waiting to access HRT, when sometimes it was hard to read other people be joyous about the effects it was having on them.

Is it just magical thinking from my upbringing: if you seem too excited about something it might be taken away?

Is it something about my relationship with my body never having been all that positive because of its interactions with fatness and disability?

It's probably some of all of these.

I just saw this shared on Facebook (by someone calling themselves Trauma Geek) and I feel like it's describing me pretty perfectly.

Under-stimulation contributes to burnout.

Burnout is not just about over-stimulation. It’s about missing the right kind of stimulation, the kind that brings us to coherence and flow.

Burnout is about not having access to pleasure, joy, safe connection, and rest.

Burnout comes from not having co-regulation, not having a safe home space, not having a network of people we can call on for help, not being able to fully express ourselves, not having time in nature, not having time for hobbies or art or play. Burnout comes from not having any of the numerous things that mammals need as social beings - clean air, reliable food sources, soundscapes without mechanical noise, natural water, singing, dancing, community, etc.

Not having what we need is just as stressful to the body as being over-stimulated. Not having what we need causes our nervous system to send the same danger signals and activate the same stress responses as when we encounter a significant threat in our environment. Not having what we need is perceived as a significant threat to the body.

Burnout recovery is not ONLY about avoiding too much stimulation and resting/sleeping as much as possible. It’s also about finding healthy and helpful stimulation to replace aversive stimulation.

The kinds of stimulation that tell us we are safe at an Autonomic level can be incredibly difficult to access in the modern world. Burnout is 100% not your fault. It’s a collective problem that requires a collective solution.

Burnout is often caused by the wrong kind of stimulation. Healing is often about finding the right kinds of stimulation for our nervous system to perceive deep safety. I want to work towards creating a world where the right kind of stimulation is more easily accessible by all.

I've been thinking of burnout in a work context, and I absolutely am under-stimulated there (and what stimulation I do have has been unusually likely to be negative which is also hard).

But also this fits well with my other problems about never really being able to replace what lockdowns and coincidental but poorly-timed loss of friendships, volunteering activities, and feeling part of things bigger than myself.

I think this might help explain why I'm terrible at resting too: I already get a lot of rest. Too much. Not enough other things.

I have always hated how monolingual I am (seriously even when I was a kid I was hungry for the very few bits of Spanish and German language education available to me (I still can tell you the three German words I remember learning as a maybe-kindergartener in some one-off session held in the old art room on the high school attached to my elementary school), but rarely more than in Belgium these last few days.

And it just made me realize that I feel bad about it now but I really had very little chance of avoiding it. I know from the class I took on psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics that there's a thing literally called the "critical period" for language acquisition and it stops when you're like six. I had no choice over almost anything that happened to me until I was six! And almost none of it was in any language other than English.

I was having this conversation with a friend today who lives in Scotland and is from the Philippines, and they said they get uncomfortable when they apologize for forgetting some word (English is a native language of theirs but hey we all forget words) or messing up some similar thing, and the British person they're talking to says something like "You do much better in English than I ever would in your language!" They say this just makes them uncomfortable. We got talking about why and they said it was just because they feel awkward when people are "needlessly self-deprecating" (which they recognize is a problem now that they live in the UK!).

I don't want to put words in their mouth but even though I've said such similar things that I was worried when they described this response that it was one they've had from me (it apparently wasn't, phew), once I put a moment's thought into it I can see so many reasons it could make someone uncomfortable.

The number of languages people speak is treated as such a virtue by monolingual/English speakers, and of course people can and do learn languages by deliberate converted effort as adults, but so much of our linguistic repertoire is determined by upbringing: where you live(d), the people raising you, the values of your family/caregivers/region, many disabilities can affect language acquisition and use... A lot of really personal stuff is bound up in this! And the majority of those personal factors are things we didn't control because of our very young age when those factors have their strongest effect.

I'm starting to think it's really weird to say things like "you speak English better than I speak your language"!

I was thinking a lot about language in Brussels of course. D was perhaps at times self-conscious about his French on the occasions people could tell he's English and switched to English. But he is English, so that seems fine to me? Maybe easy for me to say because I have no ambitions to know French at all so it didn't feel personal to me. But he doesn't use his schoolboy French except on these rare occasions so it's only to be expected that it doesn't sound native.

I imagine my linguist prejudices are showing here though, because I also found myself questioning why native or "passing" for native is valued so highly. I found myself wondering why French is "better" than English and of course it's not except as arbitrary convention. So it's good manners, it's polite, to try to speak French in Belgium, to make the effort. It also separates British people from the stereotypes of their countrymen as going to other countries, refusing to learn the local language, just shouting at people in slow English that might include an increasing number of slurs and swear words... So it can be important to someone's self-image too: I'm like this, I'm not like that.

I get that. But, I dunno, I think French and English are basically identical because they're both colonial languages with outsized influence and a lot of assholes touting their supremacy, so who cares lol.

I wonder if this prizing of native-like fluency is a particular flaw of us monolingual English speakers too, because that's all we know so of course it is the standard we always want to reach. I feel like this, as so much here, is probably me fumbling at something there's whole reams of academic thought about, so I don't need to reinvent this particular wheel from first principles.

I just realized when D and I started talking about plans to see his family at the end of the month how much I am looking forward to Christmas this year.

It is the first one where I haven't been with my family or feeling the ache of missing my family. Even a year ago, I was wondering if I'd ever see my grandma again, etc. And this year I've been back twice! And the second time was recently enough that I'm still overwhelmed at the thought of going back again! It's perfect. I haven't had time to romanticize Home and Faaaamily and everything yet. I don't even feel sad that I had my last Christmas in the house where I grew up without even knowing it, in 2019.

2019 was the last Christmas with my husband too, and I didn't know that either.

Maybe that's for the best.

It's nice to for once face "the holidays" feeling so...unencumbered.

Really weird! But nice.

(Almost all the links here that aren't to the play itself were chosen kind of haphazardly, to illustrate points I've absorbed over a long period and don't have single sources or go-to good references for. I've skimmed them pretty well but if I scrutinized and sought out perfect explanations, I would never have gotten this written today.)

I found out about this play because one of my coworkers is involved in the music for it, and after she told me what it I was really intrigued. And it's nice to see the RSC being cool about gender as part of its promotion of this play.

But I'm a little wary of something using "boi" to mean "queer-coded" when my understanding is that this is appropriation of Black American English/AAVE and also knowing that cowboy itself has been whitewashed by Hollywood so we don't think about how many cowboys were Black, Mexican, mixed race, etc. The word boy itself has a racist element (and I can't believe it never occurred to me before now that this might be why boi was such a valuable distinction for Black people to make: a useful subversion of a word used against them so it could be transformed into something for them).

I don't expect any of this to be addressed by an apparently-white presumably-British (the text on their webpage is aggressively northern-English) person.

Shame, because now I wanna see that play!

It's weird being a white USian in Britain sometimes. I know so little of my own country's history, because of how bigoted our education system is, but I still feel like I "know too much" to be capable of enjoying an idea like "the Wild West" in the way the people around me do. The description of the play describes the women of this "sleepy town in the Wild West" as "repressed" and wearing "petticoats" just seems so odd considering what I know of what rural or "frontier" life was like. "The Wild West" might have been going on at the same time as the Victorian era in Britain, but this isn't where people were covering table legs for propriety's sake.

I might be reading too much into this, but now I worry it's straw-manning the genders of white settler-colonialist women (which are restrictive enough as it is!) in order to make the "gender revolution"* feel as drastic as possible when it arrives.

I really don't mean to criticize this play, which I know nothing about except what's on that RSC page I linked to and my colleague saying the costumes are great. I sat down just to share the link! This is where writing gets you, it's dangerous!

* That one transmasc person can apparently being about! Seems like a lot of pressure when I have no hope of doing similar among the farmwives in my family of origin...