Questionnaire

Identity crisis: addendum

As a follow-up to my earlier post:

I have a friend that lives in Texas. He is eighteen; and was in the process of learning to drive when the pandemic struck. He recently visited the state DMV to renew his learner’s permit; and much to his surprise, was given a full driver’s license instead.

I get it; they are trying to keep the system working under a difficult set of circumstances. All the same, my friend is attempting to continue on with his driving education, for what he holds in legal capability, he lacks in actual practical experience and confidence.

This is what it feels like to become an entirely different gender at 37. I’m legally a woman, but I have no idea what I’m doing.

Dose two

Well; three weeks later, and we got our second COVID vaccine doses.

Although I wish this was not the case, I went from zero to full-on flashback in bout twenty minutes; and expect to remain in some variation of that mindset for the next few days.

I would like to stress for the new reader: this is not a side effect of the vaccine, and I strongly recommend that (where medically possible) everyone get it. This is purely my past history interacting with current events.

On the bright side, in a little over two weeks I will start treatment with a new EMDR therapist. I am very much hoping that goes a long way towards bringing these sorts of undesirable episodes under control.

Shuffle Meme - Part 1

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

feed-the-roses tagged me on this, and it looks fun! Now I’m gonna go ahead and do it completely wrong.

For starters, I don’t have a single, unified music collection. There are albums that I’ve fixed the metadata and art on; they live in Groove. There is a considerably larger collection of files that haven’t been fixed yet, and they get played in Winamp (which is currently enjoying a revival, by the by). And I’ve been using Spotify of late.

I also did some serious curating here. Although I used shuffle to get a random sampling of artists, I thought it made more sense to me to list my favorite tracks.

Without further ado:

Spotify

Mega Dis Bomb The Bass - Mega Dis EP I love Beat Dis. I fucking love Megablast! What’s not to love about an update that combines the two? (Also highly recommended: d4xx’s Step 2 Dub Remix.)

Suicide Jag Chemlab - Burn Out At The Hydrogen Bar I’ve had a copy of KMFDM’s Death Before Taxes Remix of Electric Molecular in my library since forever; but this year I decided to revisit Chemlab’s back catalog and I am so glad that I did!

Out Of Touch Hall And Oates - Big Bam Boom I realize that this has been doing the rounds on Tumblr; but for me, it has a different association: I played a lot of Saints Row 2 last year, and this became my go-to song while driving to a soon-to-be crime scene.

Everybody Wants To Rule The World Ted Yoder - Songs From The Orchid I instantly became a fan of Yoder after catching his collaboration with Curt Smith. Also: the hammered dulcimer is such a gorgeous-sounding instrument; it deserves more love!

Human The Chain Gang Of 1974 - Felt It’s such a bittersweet song; as if the subject is revisiting their regrets in their last few moments of life...

Why does the list stop at five? Well, because practically everything else I listen to on Spotify is from my ‘80s playlist and revisiting it here might get a bit redundant!

On to Part 2...

Unexpected HRT side-effect #10

 Confusing simple homonyms.

For context: while I am not dyslexic, there are certain idiosyncrasies with how my brain inputs, organizes, and outputs information that resembles a mild form of that particular disorder.

One example would be: analog clocks confuse me. My brain takes great umbrage at the hour hand - which is the larger unit of measurement - being represented by the smaller hand; and vice versa with the minute hand. If I need to read an analog clock, I have to manually reassert the correct order of the hands in my head; and this happens with each and every attempt.

Another is that certain words have unintuitive spellings (e.g. ‘Wednesday’; ‘business’); and I have to intentionally mispronounce them in my head to recall the correct spelling.

These are not major impediments; but are something I deal with on a daily basis. (As to why this is, I have no idea - there is a known association between left-handedness and dyslexia, so perhaps this has something to do with it; it could also be a result of the structural mismatch between my brain and body).

After starting HRT, I noticed that I was regularly confusing simple homonyms - ‘to’ and ‘too’; ‘now’ and ‘know’; ‘their’ and ‘they’re’; and so on. While I’ve been dealing with this problem my whole life, the actual set of troublesome words has been fixed since childhood; so it’s kind of interesting to see not only the set now expand, but with basic vocabulary that has never posed an issue before!

Cold: addendum 1

I still have a cold. I'm still trying to practice my singing and it's still being impinged upon because of my symptoms.

Currently I have some phlegm in my throat; and it's fine and well until I get up to A4 and then it starts to resonate, and I make the most ungodly noise that sounds not entirely unlike Chewbacca trilling.

It just so happens that I'm trying to practice in the region of A4 / B4; so to say that this is inconvenient would be an understatement. Likewise, there isn't really a solution - clearing my throat might help for a hot second, but the problem very quickly reasserts itself.

I know I just need to be patient and wait for this to clear but... I don't want to! I just want to sing...

Unexpected HRT side-effect #5

I got my artistic creativity back.

For real.

I was bursting with creativity as a teenager. I wrote, I drew, I painted, I modeled, I designed, I composed. I would be overtaken by these ideas and was compelled to bring them into being.

...Then it went away.

This I ascribed to the usual factors: newfound work and family responsibilities that overtook my time.

Now I posit a different theory: it’s my belief that I have a female-structured brain; and that the operation of certain parts of it require a sufficient provision of estrogen. Suffice to say, by the end of the teenage years, estrogen was in rather short supply and my brain malfunctioned accordingly.

That is no longer an issue; and I find myself once again not only bursting with ideas but more importantly, utterly driven to birth them into the world. The catgirl shirt was one such project; now I’m about to complete a painting (details omitted here, as it’s mildly NSFW).

It’s good to be back!

Dose one

Yesterday the wife, daughter and I got our first COVID vaccine doses. We go back in three weeks for the second dose. There haven’t been any real side effects barring the usual sore arm and some very minor feverishness / muscle aches.

(I have been lead to understand that the second dose may result in stronger side effects, which makes sense. An older fellow at the clinic told me in passing conversation that thanks to his second dose, he had experienced hot flashes and was now highly sympathetic to the plight of menopausal women.

This got a giggle from me; when I started HRT, my estradiol injections were spaced too far apart and as a result I would effectively experience menopausal symptoms. I replied with “I know how that goes!” and left it at that...)

Mentally however, I am struggling a bit. I will preface this with two items:

I am pro-science and pro-vaccine. I understand that no vaccine can be 100% safe; however, the odds of something going terribly wrong are far, far lower than if you contract COVID.

I had a very, very bad flashback the other night; one that practically set a new bar in terms of intensity; and I’m still feeling some of the effects from that days later.

So: I get very upset when I perceive my bodily integrity (or that of people I care about) being violated. The key factor is my consent. For instance:

At the end of my visa medical, I received two vaccinations. I took offense at (a) not being informed beforehand that this would happen, (b) the administering provider’s refusal to explain what they were for, and (c) the generally dehumanizing treatment I had been exposed to that day. (I have no problem with receiving vaccines as a prerequisite of entry to the US; it was how the process unfolded that was the issue.)

I have never had chickenpox, and elected to receive the varicella vaccine. Everything went smoothly, and I’m glad I made that choice.

To bring us full-circle:

I want to do my part to get us out of this pandemic; and that means being vaccinated. However, I cannot shake the feeling that this is being forced upon me - not by the nebulous puppet-masters that anti-vaxxer conspiracists like to point to, but by the various government institutions that prioritized partisan politics over protecting people, and the self-same people that prioritized their right to endanger others else instead of covering their stupid fleshy talk circles with a bit of cloth and knocking off the partying for a while.

It doesn’t sit well.

Alas, there’s not a whole lot I can do about this as the requirement to be vaccinated still stands; but it does rather mean that I have yet another reason (and I already had plenty to begin with) to intensely dislike the swathe of selfish misanthropes revealed during the course of this crisis.

ADHD

Ah, so.

What can I say?

My daughter was diagnosed with inattentive-type ADHD this year. I also have three adult friends that are very open about their struggles with the disorder. Between the four of them, I've learned a great deal about the issue.

As often happens in these sorts of situations, I started to see the kind of symptoms they were describing in myself. It went from "Ah, I can relate" to "Why am I in this picture?" to "Wow, I seriously need to get myself checked out". (The straw that broke the proverbial camel's back was a set of compliance courses my employer requires be completed each quarter. The courses themselves are, empirically-speaking, poorly designed; but I struggled with them to such an extent - and my peers did not - that it really highlighted that we weren't having the same experience.)

There has already been an initial assessment; and the takeaway was that I most likely had ADHD too and that a fuller assessment was warranted (which is now scheduled for February).

In the interim, well: in the last three years I've transitioned; begun treatment for PTSD; and now, apparently, discovered that I require treatment for ADHD also.

I am familiar with the gross unfairness of only getting the help I need with the first two so late in life; and fully expect the same sort of feelings to hit me at some point regarding the latter. This hasn't happened yet; but we shall see.

(Not to mention: how the hell did I make it this far in life - let alone remain sufficiently functional to build a career and support my family - with three major irregularities in my brain structure and chemistry? I'm honestly nonplussed.)

Night surprise

Our three eldest cats have a simple routine: play, eat, sleep. For whatever reason, the youngest cat is the opposite: sleep, eat, play.

She is also very smart. She loves the laser pointer, and knows that it lives next to our bedside table; and will sit on the aforesaid table and sing to us when she wants to play.

This is all very cute except at nighttime, as we would like to sleep and she would like to play. This was the case last night, and unfortunately the cat would not listen to our polite requests to desist and so she was shut out of the room.

What then followed was a twenty-minute admixture of singing from the hallway and banging on the door. Eventually she grew bored, and decided to revisit another of her favorite pastimes (trying to pry the under-sink closet in the bathroom open; a process that involves more loud banging).

In the middle of the night, I visit the bathroom and as I’m sitting there in the dark, doing my thing, the youngest cat just casually strolls out of the closet like Samara crawling out of the television!

25g

I’ve written before about how I administer my estradiol in form of a fortnightly intramuscular injection. The chief benefit is that it offers the greatest degree of bioavailability; but at the cost of... you know, routinely poking myself.

I actually use two different needles. There is a large, 18g needle for drawing the medication from the vial (because you want a large needle when pulling liquid into the syringe); and a 23g needle for injecting (because the smaller the needle, the less discomfort it causes going in).

Thankfully, the needles are color-coded; and over time, I learned to recognize them. When I’m having blood drawn, it’s with an 18g (which is why the “You’ll feel a sharp pinch” speech has some merit to it). One time the technician used a 23g needle (maybe my vein was inaccessible that day; maybe it was from personal preference) - I barely felt it going in!

(I think next time I’m getting blood work done, I’m going to ask them to use a 23g...)

I’m fascinated by vaccinations, because they give the same “You’ll feel a poke” talk but honestly, there’s hardly an sensation at all compared to my routine injections. I looked up the spec sheet and discovered they are using 25g needles; and the last time I saw my endocrinologist I requested they proscribe me some to test with.

Anyway, this is a very long-winded way of saying that I got to try out a 25g needle today and honestly, it was such an improvement - there was no pain popping it in! I do have to be a bit more careful now as depressing the syringe plunger required a lot more effort (I assume estradiol cypionate is a bit more viscous than whatever medium vaccines sit in); and that has to still be done in a very controlled way.

All the same though: great experience; would recommend!