Category: personal

Categories
my exciting life personal

Fixing Small Things

Unintentionally, today ended up being a fix stuff around the house kind of day. I was planning to take it easy and get some writing done, so maybe this was me avoiding writing when my house is already pretty clean. But honestly, it felt really good to do. I had a light fixture falling a bit out of the wall, which I got back into place using a madison strip. And then I had a big crack in a different wall (which I accidentally caused with my sit-stand desk… long story) and I got that spackled and painted.

I’m not a big home improvement guy. Most of the time, I am well aware that I am not The Guy and I need to find The Guy and pay them to fix the thing that’s gone wrong in my house. But I can spackle, goddammit, and I can paint. And apparently I can stick a Madison strip in the wall after I’ve watched a sufficient number of YouTube videos.

There’s a tiny bit of magic in fixing a small thing. Even if at the time you’re sweating into your eyes and wish you could just figure out why the fucking screw isn’t going in properly. Maybe it’s a way to exert control over your environment, similar to cleaning and organizing. At least when it’s something small and manageable like this, rather than soul-destroying like drilling out a broken fence post so you can set a new one. And right now, I think I needed something that would let me feel like I had even a little control over my surroundings… since right now I seem to be drifting back into my bad old habit of sleep procrastination, something I’ve classically done when I don’t feel like I have control over anything else.

Though at least this time I can say I’m not sleep procrastinating because I hate my job. I do hate being trapped in my house because of a pandemic–and all the other shitfuckery going on out there–and I know I’m not the only one. I can’t do anything about these things except phone calls and letters, and I’ve already done those. Doomscrolling Twitter doesn’t actually accomplish anything. It’s made it difficult for me to write, if I’m being honest, because I’m just so damn tired all the time–and sometimes tired means actually tired, and sometimes tired actually means depressed.

So today I fixed a light fixture and I spackled a wall. They weren’t big things, or urgent things, but my house is just a little bit nicer because of something I’ve done. Tomorrow, I’ll bake a loaf of bread for my housemate and I to enjoy for the week, and my house is going to smell lovely. For today, that’s enough.

(I am also putting more into my Patreon, by the way. So far this weekend, I’ve watched and written about Love and Monsters and the first two episodes of WandaVision.)

Categories
personal

Thoughts on turning 40

So I turned 40 yesterday. All my jokes about taking a birthday raincheck for probably two years until I can actually do something celebratory aside, it’s a thing that happened. It’s been 40 years since 1980.

Yeah, I know. I think it’s bullshit, too. I’m still absolutely certain the 90s were only like ten years ago.

I can say that when I was 20, turning 40 seemed like a hazy, unimaginable temporal distance. 40 seemed old. And I remember when my dad turned 40 and we gave him a cane and a cake with black icing on it (which stained everyone’s mouths in a really, horrifying yet satisfying way) and black crepe paper. It did seem old. And distant. And unknowable.

I’ve learned after 40 years that old is a relative thing. When music that I, in all honestly, mostly hated in high school (sorry to all my peers, but I will never be over my loathing of either Nirvana or the Red Hot Chili Peppers) turns up on the oldies station, I turn into dust and blow away because it forces me to remember that we’re now further away from the 90s than I was from the 70s when I was hearing some of my dad’s favorite music on those stations. When Those Damn Kids on Twitter or TikTok (or alternatively, my nieces, who are both far too clever than they have any right to be) remind me that they never knew a world without the internet, or mention things from the 80s and 90s as vintage and retro, I feel old because I’m suddenly reminded I’m no longer the baby in the room. Even as a working adult, up until I was in my late twenties I was always the youngest person in my workplace. I was always younger than my doctors.

Well, not any more.

The perception of time is relative. The perception of how we change is also relative, because from the inside, most change is slow and incremental and it’s only when you look back in the aggregate that you can realize the 22 years since you officially became an adult have changed you, and distilled you, and taught you a lot of things, and slowly stripped away your fucks until you have so few left you jealously save them for the things that really, really, really matter.

I don’t feel old. I still feel like me. I feel like more me than I felt when I was 20 and had no fucking idea who me actually was. Aging is an excavation into yourself, a journey down into an unmapped cave system that doubles and triples back and has dead ends and wrong turns and every time you get to a new cave and try to encompass its breadth and depth and beauty–or ugliness–and incorporate it into your heart, you realize there’s still deeper to go. It’s a process of always becoming rather than simply being that I honestly hope never stops, so that even on the day I die (which will hopefully be many more decades in the future) I’m still looking into the crystallizations of my experience with all their layers and imperfections and thinking, Oh, that’s new.

Even when I was 20, I looked seriously askance at people who talked about high school as their glory days, like it couldn’t get any better. From another 20 years down the road, the only thing from those previous decades I could ask for is the skeletal system, with its joints still filled with their full complement of cartilege. My 20s weren’t bad–I had plenty of good times–and neither were my 30s. They were a mix of all things. But I would never ask to go back to the person I was 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago, because I’ve learned so much along the way about patience and beauty and determination and letting go. I’ve learned so much about where to have my emotional callousses and what pain is worth feeling because it’s part of being deeply connected to my own humanity and the lives of my fellow travelers on this world.

It feels a little strange to be writing something so… happy and heartfelt, I guess, when the world feels like an entire goddamn disaster. Maybe this all sounds too rosy; I don’t want to gloss over that there has been some truly awful, shitty stuff in the last couple of decades. Things that I would go back and change, if I could. Things I’m not proud of about the people I used to be, that I try to be honest and unflinching about when called upon, because that, too, is something to learn from. But as I’ve been thinking about all of this, it’s also undeniable that even when the external has been a struggle at times, internally I’m less of a goddamn mess than I’ve ever been.

And looking back at it, as scary and superstitious as it felt to be approaching 40–oh no, a round number we have arbitrarily decided is important because our culture works in base 10–I’m actually just grateful for everything I’ve learned and all the people I have loved. And if 40 years is what it took to get here, I can’t wait to see where I am and who I’ve become in 10, 20, 30, and if I’m lucky even 40 more.

This post actually started as a Twitter thread, and then I decided I had a lot more to say and think about, and even if not as many people will read it because it’s not as pithy, I’d rather it be mine. What I originally started with was trying to just sum up what I’ve learned over the last 20 years. Instead, that’s how I’m going to end this. We’ll see what I learn in the next 20.

  1. Always ask yourself what you’re actually trying to accomplish.
  2. Set achievable goals and focus your energy on things you can control.
  3. Gender is like Whose Line Is It Anyway? where everything’s made up and the points don’t matter.
  4. Kind is better than nice–but always ask yourself who you’re being kind to.
  5. Setting boundaries and defending them is ultimately healthier for everyone.
  6. Listening is better than talking.
  7. No matter how frustrating it feels, incremental progress is still progress.
  8. Learning to take joy in the success of others is sometimes easier said than done, but it’s worth the practice.
  9. It’s okay to stop doing things that make you miserable; suffering is not actually noble.
  10. Don’t be a macho shithead.
  11. Change is constant and you have to learn the difference between what can be fought and what must be accepted and adapted to.
  12. Big problems require collective action.
  13. Always say “I love you.”

(PS: If you want to wish me a happy birthday, you can always buy one of my books or leave a review of them or give money to Stacey Abrams’s organization Fair Fight because I literally cannot think of a better present than a Senate where a majority doesn’t hate trans people.)

Categories
personal

Wish List 2017

This is not a hint of any kind. Unless you’re someone who has been asking me for my holiday wish list, please pretend this post isn’t even here.

  1. Rockport cap toe oxfords, black, size 7 1/2
  2. 1-2 pairs of jeans from cabela’s, womens size 18 regular (this style also okay)
  3. Zojirushi micom 5.5 cup rice cooker (like this)
  4. Gift cards: iTunes, Barnes & Noble, Alamo Drafthouse, King Soopers
  5. Set of 2 Gravity Dice D6 (any color; ones I currently have are red)
  6. 1 D20 from Gravity Dice (any color; one I currently have is red)
  7. Smartwool hiking socks, crew, medium to light cushion, sized for a mens 7.5/womens 10 (any color ok)
  8. Cream of Earl Grey and Glitter and Gold from David’s Tea (or anything else that looks tasty; I prefer black tea.)
  9. Lord Shaxx t-shirt (size large)
  10. Ghost plush
  11. Foam replica Hammer of Sol
  12. Parker Quink black ink refill (NONwashable)
  13. Xbox One controller 
  14. Halo Wars 2 and Child of Light for Xbox one
  15. A couple of crochet books (I mostly like making blankets and scarves and easier projects since I crochet while I’m watching TV)
  16. Mexican Train domino set and score pad
Categories
personal politics

Things I remember from the strike

I grew up in a union house. My dad was a chief steward in the CWA (local 7750). I remember there being one strike (and the threat of others) when I was growing up. Looking at the CWA history, I’m pretty sure this is what I remember:

1986: Post Divestiture Bargaining

1986 presented CWA with its first negotiations with the post-divestiture telephone industry. Twelve years after CWA had achieved national bargaining, the union was forced back to the old multiple table way of bargaining. CWA had to bargain not only with AT&T, but with the independent RBOCs and their subsidiaries. National bargaining had been replaced by 48 different bargaining tables.

In the AT&T negotiations, the company attempted to take back health care benefits, lower clerical wages, and eliminate cost of living adjustments obtained in earlier contracts. CWA had no choice but to strike. The strike lasted 26 days and AT&T agreed to provide wage and employment security improvements and retain the health care benefits intact. Although the negotiations with the RBOCs were also difficult, they were less contentious than those with AT&T. Strikes were necessary against some of these operating companies, but none lasted more than a few days.

So I was five going on six at the time. Needless to say, my memories aren’t that sharp or specific. But things I do remember?

  • Going with my dad to where the everyone met and getting food for our house. Also getting my fingernails and toenails painted because I was wearing sandals. I’m pretty sure this is from the strike, but don’t quote me.
  • Learning what “scabs” are, and that they’re bad. Well, of course they’re bad, I thought. Scabs are pretty gross, and you pick them off and flick them away, and then whats underneath is all gross and oozy. Why would you want to be like a scab?
  • My parents not wanting to buy things or spend money because they didn’t know how long the strike would last.
  • Having a play picket line with my older brother outside our house, because we saw dad with his sign for the picket line. My brother had a sign on a stick. I had a little sandwich board sign made with poster board and string.

That’s honestly it. When you’re that young, things don’t impact you the same way. And I think my parents worked hard to make sure we didn’t really know what the financial situation was like… because you try to keep your kids out of those worries until they’re too big to hide.

I was a member of the CWA for the just shy of six years that I worked for AT&T, later. There was one time when we had a strike vote–I voted yes, but at the time a lot of my coworkers argued with me, because they thought the union was pointless and what they were going after wasn’t worth a strike. I had my doubts at the time (I was young and stupid and that’s a whole other blog post – and I also didn’t have much of a strike fund saved up, so that was scary too) but I was glad about being union later when I needed my rep to sit in a couple meetings between me and my supervisor. And I was weirdly glad that because of the union, I knew when my job was on the layoff chopping block, because I was low on the seniority list. I’d rather get let go for that than because I didn’t suck up to my boss sufficiently.

Anyway.

This post brought to you by me taking a break from writing about the Ludlow Massacre and feeling angry. And because the WGA West has asked its membership for strike authorization and I’m already seeing people (who aren’t writers) bitching about it because they don’t want their TV shows interrupted when the world is a fiery political hell pit.

People don’t strike because it’s fun. It disrupts your life in ways you can’t imagine and can fuck you over financially even if you win in the end. People strike because the companies never stop trying to push workers further down the hole. Because it’s the only way the workers have to defend themselves from a line getting crossed. So I’m sorry if it inconveniences you, but the writers (or communications workers, or electricians, or truckers, or grocery store workers or…) aren’t the ones you should bitch at. The bosses trying to kill them by inches are.

It’s not greedy to want a decent life for yourself and your loved ones, and it’s not out of line to want your labor (and writing is labor, fuck off) to be respected. If you already have that good of a life, don’t shit on people trying to get to that level. And if you don’t have what they do, why the fuck are you shitting on them for wanting better, and why aren’t you fighting for better for yourself?

In 1886, during the Great Southwest Railroad Strike, Jay Gould (owner of the Union Pacific and Missouri Pacific Railroads) famously said: “I can hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half.”

Whose side are you on?

Categories
lgbt personal

Let this be my act of defiance.

Let me start with a geology story. I promise, there’s a point to this.

When I was a geologist at the research company, I had a core come in. There was a ten foot section of it that I didn’t know how to describe. It was fine-grained, filled with burrows. So far so good. But the mineralogy was… puzzling. Not enough dolomite to be described as a dolostone, not enough clay to be described as a mudrock, not enough quartz sand and silt to be described as some kind of sandstone or siltstone. It sat basically at the nexus of all possible rock types for that environment and was definitively none of them. In absolute frustration, I dubbed it “shit rock” and wrote all my reports and captions accordingly.

Of course, this is a business. I couldn’t actually turn in reports to the client with the term “shit rock” used. So I had a long talk with my boss. The problem with geology, he explained, is that everything we work on is a continuum. So there will always be something that falls in that liminal state where you’re not quite sure what it is, and even if you wanted to do battle with the rest of the community to coin a new term, you’d just be replacing one borderland with two. You can write definitions all day that will define 99.999% of all the rocks out there, but then some son of a bitch is going to come in with the 0.001% case because there are a lot of rocks on Earth, and one in a million things happen more often then any of us can grasp.

There will always be rocks that defy easy classification. You eventually just have to dip your toe into the art rather than science and describe it how you feel fits best – and then be ready to defend your decision.

Which comes to me. A little while ago on Twitter, I said:

And then while I was taking a shower, because all my most important thinking happens in the shower or when I’m supposed to be trying to fall asleep, I realized that it was an empty thing to say without the rest of this post.

I’ve been nibbling at the edges of this for a while, trying to figure things out. But maybe it’s the scientist in me, I don’t like committing to anything unless I’m absolutely certain – and the thing about life is that absolute certainty is in shorter supply than most people would like to believe. Because what if I’m wrong? How do I defend something that I’m still figuring out? But I don’t feel like I have the luxury of wibbling quietly into the night any more.

Because you see, in this way, gender’s got something in common with geology. Everything works on a continuum. You will always find cases that defy classification, and no matter how frustrating that is, they don’t go away. And that is part of the beauty of the world, trust me.

So how do I define myself? Queer, for certain. Sometimes it’s easier to tell people what a rock – or yourself – isn’t than what it is. I’m not female. I don’t quite think I’m male either, but I’d have to give it a good few years try out before I could say for certain. Fuck knows, it’s taken me something like 34 years to figure out the “not female” bit, but GOD it has been a relief since I reached that conclusion. So my big request here is to please use a gender-neutral pronoun (they) if possible. Or if you just can’t make that work in your brain, because I know the verb conjugation gives people mental cramp at times, masculine (he).

And please, call me Alex. It started out as… not a joke, precisely, when I came up with my pen name. But it’s grown on me, like a much more comfortable skin.

But there’s a point to this, and it’s not just me sitting at my keyboard and crying. I’ve been doing that too often in the last forty-eight hours.

When I was a baby queer growing up surrounded by kids and adults who thought “smear the queer” was a perfectly acceptable name for a game that involved throwing balls at other people so hard it gave them bruises (and I was one of those kids, because at the time I didn’t know better), it was invaluable to me when I started seeing LGBT people openly be themselves. It told me that there were more options that I knew, that maybe I didn’t have to keep trying to jam myself into a mold I didn’t fit, and I could be happy.

Since the election yesterday, there’s already been countless stories of racism, sexism, and homophobia being flung at people with renewed abandon. I live in a place where it’s relatively safe – swing state turned pretty reliably blue state Colorado, in the Denver-Boulder area – to be out. So I think that I need to be as out as possible even if I’m not entirely happy with my R-squared values, because now more than ever it’s important to make it known that we exist. That we will not go away. That people who are like me, who live in environments where they are not safe, are not alone even if they can only hold that truth silently in their heart.

Sometimes, merely living, existing, is an act of defiance, denying the narrative that we are fictional, or merely confused, or unhappy, or intrinsically broken.

Let this be my act of defiance. Let this be the first of many.

– Alex

Categories
personal

(Personal) Wish List

My birthday is coming up, as is Christmas. As usual, putting this here for ease of reference for people close enough to me to want to throw a gift tied to a brick through my window.

Everyone else, carry on, nothing to see here.

In order of how desperately I need the thing:

  1. 2.5″ metal collar stays (eg: these, though I’m not sure what the length is here)
  2. Doc Martens For Life, black mens size 7 (my original black Docs are falling apart)
  3. Rockport cap toe oxfords, black, size 7 1/2 (current pair also falling apart)
  4. iTunes gift cards / send me books on Audible so I have things to listen to while I drive all over Denver for work
  5. Starbucks gift cards since I seem to be haunting Starbucks a lot during my breaks
  6. Subscription to Vanity Fair
  7. Subscription to Teen Vogue
  8. Pocket watch chain
  9. NOOK Glowlight Plus
  10. Sunbreaker T-shirt, size mens large
  11. Travel (tea) mug 
  12. Blue Yeti Microphone
  13. CycleOps Magneto | Leveling Block
Categories
personal

Has it really been almost a month?

I look away for five minutes, and suddenly it’s been almost a month since I posted anything in my blog. Well, hi guys. I’m still alive. To be honest, I can’t say I’m having that much fun with it, though.

Basically, I’m deep in the pit of home renovation hell. Every time I walk into my house, I swear to god that more things are wrong with it. I spent three hours today sanding shitty paint off a windowsill. Why? Because I’ve lost my goddamn mind. At least that’s my assumption. My house is a disaster area that has exactly 33% of a floor, and the rest is composed of broken 1970s tile, tack strips, killz sealer, and chthonic evil.

I’m also, since we’re being honest here (just between you and me, right?) a giant ball of stress because my inbox is full of emails letting me now that my qualifications as a geologist are great and I should feel totally proud of myself, but I’m not in the top pool of candidates, so fuck off. This is what happens when the industry a lot of geologists depend on is in a bust cycle. It sucks. I’m on my last three weeks of unemployment, so if you hear a high-pitched noise emanating from the vicinity of the Colorado Rocky Mountains, it’s just the sound of my skyrocketing blood pressure.

That said, I’ve still got my health. I’ll be in Dallas this coming weekend for FenCon, and on the way back I’ll be picking up my cats and bringing them back to Denver, finally. I have great, amazing, supportive friends. Friends who still love me even after helping me install ceiling fans or moving closet door tracks. Friends who buy me stress tacos when I tell them that I’m really thinking about just setting my house on fire and riding my bike to Mexico, because that sounds like an excellent alternative to having to spackle another fucking wall.

I love you guys. Really and truly. I don’t know why the hell any of you are friends with me any more, but I appreciate it.

I’m going to try to have some things to say in the new future (about certain problems I’ve noticed while scrounging for freelance work, about the joys of double-paned windows), but it kind of depends on how much more of my soul my house eats as to when that’ll be. Normal service should resume around the beginning of October, since that’s when there will be floor in my house again and I can get my furniture out of hock.

In the meantime, if you see a wild-eyed, spackle-covered ginger wandering the roads near you, don’t be afraid. Just give me a beer and point me back towards home. It’ll be okay.

Categories
personal

Been Busy Not Living in Texas

I can’t believe it’s been ten days since I finished my move. Where the fuck has the time gone? I feel like I just got here, and yet…

I won’t say that I regret the time I spent in Houston. That would be grossly unfair to the wonderful coworkers and the stimulating and fun work that I got to do until I experienced my “change of employment.” (Apparently that’s the term all the cool kids are using on their job applications these days.) But I never made a secret of how awful everything that wasn’t work ended up feeling to me.

I think when you grow up in Colorado, there are certain things you take for granted, including just being able to throw on your hiking books, step out your back door, and walk for miles. Houston is an endless city, far larger than Denver ever prepared me for. And even when you’re downtown in Denver, you can look west, see the mountains, and know that you can be there in an hour, climbing the Flatirons.

I’ve missed this place so much, in ways I don’t even know how to describe. Ways I didn’t know until I was driving a rented minivan (containing my bicycle, computer, and plants aka Delta and the Spice Girls) and with every mile I just felt lighter and lighter. Every other drive to or from Houston, I’ve always taken three days and felt absolutely exhausted at the end of it. This one I did in two, and it exhilarating in a way that hours on end in a minivan have no right to be. When we (my friend Corina kept me company so I didn’t have to do the drive alone) crossed the border into Colorado, I stopped at the first gas station so I could get out and hug the eight mile marker on highway 287. I wandered around with a ridiculous grin on my face, answering anyone who asked me how I was doing, “I don’t have to live in Houston ever again!”

I expected it to take a week for me to get acclimatized to the altitude again. Instead, the day after I arrived, I took out my bike, checked my tire pressure, and went for a 13 mile ride, just because I could. Like I never left, except I wasn’t this good at hill climbing four years ago.
IMG_1265There are still a hundred scary challenges waiting for me. I’m unemployed and trying to figure out what the hell I’m going to do with myself. Geology job pickings right now are so slim, they might as well be nonexistent. I still have pile of student debt gnawing at my heels that I’m scared to look at straight on. I miss my best friend Mike, and I miss my cats.

Yet I feel so much more alive. I don’t know if I was unhappy in Houston precisely, but I feel as if layers of lead and grime have peeled off of me and fallen in my wake. I can ride forever, the mountains are in the west where they belong, and the sky is so blue.

I’m home.

Categories
personal

Exit, pursued by student loans (a small plea for help)

As of yesterday, I no longer have a job. I wish I could say this is because I’ve spontaneously become independently wealthy, but that’s not the case. I worked in the petroleum industry, and all you have to do is take a look at the per-barrel price of oil over the last year to understand why I’m suddenly without employment.

I’m doing my best to be positive about this. I’m not in a bad place financially, I’ve been unemployed before and I know what I need to do. And I’m going to take this as an opportunity to move back to Colorado and start my life back up there. So hey, you don’t have to listen to me bitch about how I’m Not The Target Audience for Texas any more, and that’s a good thing too. It’s a chance to move into a new phase of life and career, it just would have been kind of nice if I’d taken the leap myself instead of being, you know, pushed.

And this is why I’m writing this blog post. I need your help. Like I said, financial situation isn’t dire, this isn’t an emergency plea, but I also no longer have an income as such. If you like what I do as a writer, please consider supporting me via Patreon, or tip me to the tune of a coffee:
Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com

I’m going to have a lot more time to write now, so if there’s stuff you’d like to see on the Patreon other than my incoherent movie notes, I’m very open to suggestions. I have netflix, a will to live blog, and an unending well of sarcasm.

Beyond that, I’m really looking to pick up freelance work. Obviously I’ve mostly written short stories, but I’ve also got a little screenwriting under my belt (including a year worth of courses at the UCLA extension) and am looking to pick up some more experience there. I can write reviews, and I promise I can adhere to house style just fine and refrain from dropping f-bombs as necessary. If you hear about anyone [who PAYS] looking for writers, please tell me.

I am also still applying for geoscience jobs, though those are hard to come by right now because there are a lot of geologists like me out of work. If you live in Colorado and hear about any jobs, please let me know so I can apply. I can even do field geology or mud logging, I’m totally fine with those things.

This is honestly pretty scary for me, and asking for help like this isn’t something I wanted to do. I’m really sad to have lost a job that I frankly loved (and coworkers that I adored), but I’m going to do my best to keep a positive attitude and move forward. Thank you, everyone. <3

(PS: Adorable cat gifs appreciated as well.)

Categories
personal

Dear Santa ’14

It’s that time of year when people are asking about wish lists and stuff, so here it is.