Confession... "Most people think I am writing a blog, but if you look closer, actually I am planning my escape."

I adore this short film. I found it a few years ago, and I think I feel a different set of emotions each time I watch it. It's charmingly French, especially as it offers several nods to classic French cinema. There's moments that make me laugh, but it often makes me quite sad too. There's a loneliness, a feeling of a sincere desperation to share something of yourself with someone. When you're lonely, there can be so much joy when someone enters your world if even for a little while. Even once you reach the end and discover "who" her visitor is I can't help feeling it's rather bittersweet. Watch it yourself and decide how you feel. I should add that the video's descrption offers these details: "Jeanne Damas humorously portrays the tormented soul of the self-indulgent 'Bohemian' who can't decide which pieces from & Other Stories' collection to wear. Director Wendy McColm presents a darker subtext that point to the changes that need to be made to the way in which women are portrayed both in, and by the fashion industry."

Inspiration... The Spook School

Music is the thing that keeps me going. It's always done that for me, and it's even more important now. Especially this band, The Spook School. I know there’s a number of transgender/gender queer artists out there, but this band really does it for me! This song especially has become a true favourite! It’s what I do every single day… I Try To Be Hopeful. 

“Sometimes I get so hopeful I make myself scared / that I will wake up and the hope will disappear 
Sometimes I see you clench your fists and close your eyes / like you’re dreading the same thing / like you’re saying your goodbyes

I’ve been waiting outside for what seems like years / when I finally get inside I’ll give in to the fear 
of finally having what I want, I’ll finally know / if this really really will fix me / if my problems will all sail away

and I know, you’ve been finding things hard / if you want to we can sit outside / and talk about anything else / and I know, you’ve been upset / I know I’m not the best, but I’ll try

I’ll try, try to be hopeful / if you try, try to be hopeful

(and we can be/the best people we could ever be)”

"There's Always Music in the Air"

When I started this blog years ago, one of the biggest focuses I had at the time was music, and this passion certainly remains. So in order to get back on track a bit, I thought I could start with a little bit of music catch-up, because a lot of new sounds have entered my life in the last two years!

It's hard to even decide where to begin, so I'll simply pick a song by an artist I'm really enjoying these days. That artist is songwriter and producer, Gabrielle Smith, and her recording project as Eskimeaux. Smith adopted this moniker in 2007, when she began creating experimental and noise albums. In the years that followed, her music transformed into a more refined sound with an increasing focus on structured songwriting. This shift is especially evident on her last album, "O.K." which she describes as "beat-driven and poetic bedroom pop." Eskimeaux is also one of the founding members of The Epoch, a Brooklyn-based songwriting and art collective. This is the single "Broken Necks" from her 2015 album, "O.K.", and she's set to have a brand new EP, "Year of the Rabbit" available on April 15, 2016.

This is a great song for this time of year as "The birds are singing louder and the days are getting longer..." but it's a springtime song that carries a tinge of sadness too.

In Between Days

Life equals change. If you don't spend some moment each day pondering a new idea, ingesting some morsel of fresh knowledge, plotting a different course, even just dancing to an unfamiliar beat, well... then we stagnate, we grey, we cease to exist in a way that really matters. In the almost two years since my last post on this little blog of mine, my life has become a tremendous place for change, for reflection, for growth, for renewal, for reinvention, for personal truth. I am happy in a way I have never known. I feel alive in the knowledge of who I am. But I am also terrified. Terrified about facing rejection, terrified in knowing the resistance that comes with going against the grain in life, and maybe a bit terrified that acceptance will be a daily struggle.

When we are born our parents and our place in this society provide us an identity, and we are each groomed to understand what we need to play this role. But not all of us can take this part and make it work for us. There's problems with the script, we act out and push the boundaries of the role, conflicts arise with other members of the cast, or we have a disagreement with wardrobe. But that's the stuff of good drama, right? That's the stuff that makes people sit up in their chairs and pay attention!  It's what makes us rethink what we've been told about everyone's role in this production we call "Life." I know I like to think I have tried to push the script since the beginning, but the truth is I have only ever been so brave.

But what was my role? Was it really so bad? Well, no... but yes! But what can I do about it? I didn't ask for this role, you just gave me this part:

• Firstborn son of a married heterosexual couple
• Two siblings, a brother and a sister
• Attendance at a local Protestant church
• Grew up in a rural farming community
• Limited exposure to life outside the "traditional white American experience"

There's times that I think that I wish I could have just gone along with all of it, and just became the person I was expected to be. Instead, I felt very deeply inside, even early on that that wasn't going to happen. I did not feel carefree or content about many aspects of this character I was set to play. My parents are truly and genuinely goodhearted people, so I will say right now that I am grateful for that. As far as me being the oldest, no objections there, and I love my siblings even despite some hurt feelings and misgivings along the way. As for being a son, well... I was cast in this boy body immediately upon joining this cast, so making that my identifying gender placed titles and pronouns and a world of expectations upon me immediately. And that is the place my problems truly began, for as I came into an understanding of what "boy" meant, what "he/his" meant, what "someday you'll be a man" required -I started to feel I didn't want that. But then what did I want? That is a decision that has taken me a lifetime to discover, and hasn't been an easy conclusion until now.  I knew as a kid that I just felt off compared to other boys. Situations like being in locker rooms were really tense for me. The dysphoric dread and terror of which team I could end up on in a soccer practice game of "shirts versus skins", was a horror I will never forget! I didn't want to take my shirt off! I remember begging Coach Nailor to "please, please let me be shirts!" I just wasn't like these "boys". These feelings were just overwhelming! Inside I thought it was wrong, but I felt like I should be a girl. So in 1992, at the age of 17 and after so many years of hurt feelings, I shared this with a few friends who did what I should have probably expected - they laughed.  So I laughed. I had to play it off, "I don't know what I'm saying, forgive me." But the feelings were true, and it has never ever waned. No matter who I dated, or that I finally got to go to art school, and especially impulsively getting married did nothing to lift this burden!

It would take twenty-three years to find the courage to sit down with a friend and tell her that inside I feel like a woman. So here I was in 2015, after years of learning a term called "transgender", after years of learning about options for medically transitioning, after countless nights spent reading others' accounts of all they did to try to be who everyone thought they should be and the courage they found to finally be who they really are... after all of that, all of these years, I have decided to finally be that person too.

I began coming out in May of last year, and on June 2nd, I had my first appointment with a gender therapist. I can genuinely say that I got so much out of this experience of therapy. It was reaffirming to my perception of my identity. We worked through the years of inner turmoil of internalising this struggle, and I was able to develop a way out of the corner I had painted myself into by developing a path to transition. I have to admit I had some initial misgivings about therapy, but it is a state required gender confirmation process that has to be done. I couldn't even talk to a doctor to begin gender transitioning without fulfilling this requirement. But the therapy really gave me a way to understand all of the challenges and necessities I would encounter and helped me develop a better road map for my transition. As I proceeded in therapy, I also did the work each week of setting goals for myself -come out to friends, find support in the community, foster relationships with allies, make financial considerations, find a health support clinic. From guidance in how to live and function as a woman, to understanding the changes in wardrobe, makeup, as well as managing the anxiety over personal image and "passing" which is an acceptance that most trans women struggle with their entire lives. I set goals every week, like I will come out to my parents by this date, I will find health services by this time, I will go to Pride in Lancaster and Harrisburg, I will go out and buy women's clothes at this time, I will secure my letter of gender confirmation by this date, and ideally begin HRT (Hormone Replacement Therapy).

I got my letter from my therapist on October 19th, and that was a very special night for me! After four and a half months of weekly therapy, I was so ready for that moment. My first doctor's appointment was the next morning at the Mazzoni Center in Philadelphia, and I don't even know how I got any sleep the night before! I had two appointments that morning. The first one was to be assessed by their on staff psychologist, and review my letter. After that initial hour, I had a small break and met with my endochrinologist for the first time! We discussed my hopes for transitioning, what I could expect from HRT and that it carries health risks too. After that, it was time to draw some blood. And that was kind of that until next month, when we would go over my labs in a follow up appointment.

That follow up came on November 18th, and I was quite pleased with the feedback on my health, especially that my natural testosterone level was already quite below low normal. I got my first HRT prescriptions for Estradiol (Estrogen) and Spironolactone, which is taken to lower the testosterone levels even further so that the estrogen can do its thing on me!

I took my first set of pills on November 19th, and taking three pills has never carried so many emotions ever before in my life! But this was it! It was really happening! This thing that I had really come to think would never, ever be possible for me in this life... the door opened and I chose to enter! Sometimes, I think about how I wish I could have arrived here sooner. I wish that I was younger in doing this, that I had taken better care of myself along the way, that this or that about my life might have gone differently. But all that really matters to me is that I am here now. This is real. I was finally ready, and the world is just a little better in its regard for the acceptance and humane treatment of transgender people. There's still so far to go -especially when it comes to protections for basic rights, access to affordable healthcare, and the overwhelming spectre of violence that exists in this world against transgender people.

But I am here, and this is happening -my transition is not even a year old, but it's been a time I will always remember! I still have a lot to learn and so far to go in this experience, but the support and encouragement I have found so far has been so good for my heart and my sense of my self worth! I got here later in life. But again I'm here, and it's time to focus on what's ahead of me!

Inspiration... "365 for 365" and what it means to me!

I recently came across an article for the AV Club by David Johnson entitled "365 for 365: The year of buying a record a day", and I must say I can relate very well to this article and what a life-affirming power music has been for me in my own life.  My life is in a rather good spot right now, and it has been since June of this past year(if you stick with me, more on that later).  I would not have said the same thing for much of the wild mood swing that was my life from late 2011 until last spring.  For all these ups and downs, I had the support of a few close friends and a goodly steady job (very thankful on both accounts), but the other driving force that got me through all of it - my soundtrack.  I feel like for any triumphs or tragedies that have come my way there's also been that connection to a song or an album or an artist that carried on stalwartly beside me, often on repeat to galvanise my heart and mind in resolute strength to stand up and meet the forces against me!  In this day and age though it is incredibly easy to take music and to take it for granted.  It have been guilty of both, but more the latter and that disregard lead me to some rather foolish decisions when times were hard.  As such a physical music collection I was once ever so proud of and took much delight in was reduced to a hard drive, and 17 large spindles of burned CDs to accompany one lonely shelf of wonders on CD and vinyl that I just couldn't live without.  Here and there since this complete err in judgement in 2007, I would vow to turn this situation around and as such some music buying would occur.  Feeling particularly out of the loop though, I focused on new bands, new finds, new sounds, and the rebuilding took a backseat to new discoveries.  Nothing wrong with that, but something was always missing.  I'd pick up the new Editors and think about how I needed to get around to adding those Deluxe Joy Division remasters to my wish list, or I'd pick up the new Franz Ferdinand and wonder about whether I should look to see what remastered Orange Juice or Josef K might be out there or on the horizon.

But then I suffered a blow in February 2013 when a WD Book with my beloved music collection decided "No, I've had it with you!" and it quit on me!  Sectors were lost, albums without a physical hard copy of any kind were gone.  Sadly, much of what I lost couldn't just be borrowed from a friend and re-ripped.  This came at a time though when I really wasn't buying any music.  My life was complicated, and I can only say there was just more important things to focus on, believe it or not.  I spent too many sickening hours trying to restore things.  In one desperate afternoon I attempted to take advantage of the winter weather and I put the hard drive in a window sill and run the cords inside to the computer to retrieve whatever I could before the drive overheated and was done.  And that was it then... I'd done all I could do.  I lost a lot of albums that had been with me a long, long time, and a lot of new music I had downloaded as samples and maybe traded some files on were just gone.  I had been buying digital albums from labels and Amazon for much of 2012 as an experiment, and it was nice that I could retrieve tracks that went into my Amazon Cloud, but my digital purchases suffered losses too.

It wouldn't be until the spring and the end of very complicated relationship, that I would be able to do much to hatch any great schemes about rebuilding my physical music library.  But then summer came and as part of the old ritual of putting myself back together again, I made music the central part.  I started getting out and looking around through music bins in charity shops and at proper record stores.  I went on a record run to Hampden with two good friends, and at a local media shop I met an amazing young woman who really enjoyed chatting about music with me and gave me her number.  Flash forward, here I am months later... love the girl, live with the girl, sharing music with her, sharing music with my friends, and these healthy passions are serving me well.  I live with a certain amount of negative noise in my head.  Life does that to you.  So I am thankful that I can connect with good people and enjoy some good tunes.  That and my lady love are all I need!

As for the collecting, I don't know if I can realise a goal as such of a new album per day because the logistics are tricky when it comes to time and funding, but I'm giving it a go in my own fashion.  To this end, I have started selling off some of my comic book collectibles, statues and such, and I'm enjoying putting those funds back into music because as a Russian lad once advised a friend, "you can't get your kicks with action figures".  As I see it I fancy all the kicks I can get!  I like the collector's adventure.  The thrill of the hunt, the suspense of what you might find when you get into a shop full of music, sharing news of your finds with good friends, hearing their tales of acquisitions, or even better hunting as a pack!  I want record runs with friends to be as frequent in my life as other guys go out for beers or a day of golf or fishing.  I'm thankful my girlfriend loves music and that we share a lot of mutual appreciations!  That makes bringing home music even more fun!  I'm even discovering that there's fun to be had online using Discogs to list my collection and want lists and buy and talk music a bit with the sellers there.  I'm looking forward to also bringing this interest in music to my passion for art.

This is good for me.  This blog is my travelogue for this journey.  Let's see where it goes!

Infatuation... New music mix "A Perfect Landing"

There's so much good music out there and on the horizon, and I'd like to make a go of sharing some of it with you. To that end, I am posting a quick mix! A first for this blog. How's that for a comeback! Eighteen tracks to put some pep in your springtime step and ideally inspire you to purchase these artists and explore their albums further!

Here's the playlist...  

A Perfect Landing
01)Trails and Ways "Tereze"
02)Maximo Park "Leave This Island"
03)Patterns "Waking Lines"
04)The National "Graceless"
05)ST. Vincent "Digital Witness"
06)The Horrors "So Now You Know"
07)Future Islands "Seasons (Waiting on You)"
08)Dum Dum Girls "Too Good To Be True"
09)Metronomy "Reservoir"
10)Damon Alburn "Everyday Robots"
11)Sabina "Toujours"
12)The Cosmonauts "Neon Kids"
13)The Brights "A Cameo Can't Last Forever"
14)Elbow "Fly Blue Boy/Lunette"
15)Franz Ferdinand "Fresh Strawberries"
16)AFI "Heart Stops"
17)Creative Adult "Deep End"
18)Let's Wrestle "Always A Friend"

...and link!

Enjoy!

The playlist link will remain active for a very limited time to honour copyrights and these artists work. A request may be made via email once link is closed.

Back To It (A Slight Return)

Why not!  Could be fun!  Let's not make any promises, but rather just see what can happen! Spring is here. There's music in the air and I feel a certain joie de vivre. I'd like to share it with you.

A classic by The Bluetones!