Author: Alyxander James

Welcome to 2017

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

It’s a new year, and one in which a lot of things look scary and uncertain. And I’m sick. I’m writing this on Wednesday; I’ve missed two days of work and I can’t breathe through my nose. Not exactly how I wanted to start the year off.

Still,  it hasn’t all been terrible. Here’s a short list of nice things that have happened in the last week:

  • My partner and I had a low-key New Year’s Eve – we had ribs and mashed potatoes for dinner, and then spent the rest of the evening playing Scrabble, drinking wine, and watching a movie. It was a lovely way to ring in the new year. And I actually made it past midnight, which hasn’t happened the past couple of years.
  • I’ve gotten a lot of knitting done. This is often the upshot of being sick and missing work. I finished the sweater I agreed to knit for my coworker’s kid, and started on a blanket for my nephew, whose birthday is coming up in a couple of months.
  • As much as being sick is no fun, I’m trying to see the bright side of it, like the fact that I was able to catch up on a bunch of sleep and get some much-needed time to myself (even if most of that time has been spent in a sort of feverish haze).

 

 

All the Feelings

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

In the week since my last post, I feel like I’ve been on a bit of an emotional roller coaster.

Our time in Minnesota went really well. Hamilton was the soundtrack of the weekend, which I didn’t warm up to immediately (despite REALLY wanting to love it), but now I’m pretty totally sold on it.

The drive up was rough – it usually takes about eight hours, but it took ten, six of which were getting to the halfway point, driving about 40 mph for a large stretch due to snow and slick roads. Once we arrived, though, we had a good time.

We saw my family the morning of Christmas Eve. I got to see my dog (she’s an old lady at almost fifteen, but still feisty, and was happy to see me and very tolerant of how affectionate I was being), and my nephew (who was hilarious and chatty, bringing out all of his toys and then all of the dog’s toys to show us), along with my parents, brother, and sister-in-law. It went well.

That evening we hung out with my partner’s dad’s family. Christmas Day was very relaxed; we spent the evening with my partner’s mom’s family. It was late nights all around, but fun to spend time with family. And Monday morning, we got breakfast with one of our dearest friends in Minnesota, which was lovely.

The drive home Monday was, thankfully, totally uneventful compared to the drive there. It was windy, but otherwise was pretty easy going.

Tuesday, I headed back to work. That was hard enough, but then about halfway through the day, we got the news that Carrie Fisher had died. It took me all day to process enough to put coherent thoughts together about it, and I’m still reeling a bit. This is what I wrote about it on Facebook:

I was raised on Star Wars and Disney movies. As much as I love Disney movies, Princess Leia was my first real role model for how a woman could be a kick-ass leader who takes no shit from men (or anyone else). As a young girl, she meant the world to me.

Now, as a Bipolar adult, I still appreciate Princess Leia (and her later iteration as General Organa), but more than that…I appreciate Carrie Fisher. She dealt with her mental illness with a delightful blend of irreverence and grace. She actively fought the stigma against mental illness. She stood up for herself when held to the impossible standards to which we hold female celebrities. She was open about her struggles and her triumphs, even though the public did little to deserve that openness (we just demanded it).

She was witty. She was funny as hell. And I am struggling to accept that she’s gone. I usually feel pretty detached from celebrity deaths (aside from being distantly sad at the loss of life in general). This feels more personal. Still, I am comforted to some degree by the thought that at least in the end, it wasn’t her Bipolar brain that killed her.

Rest In Peace, Carrie Fisher. The world is less bright without you in it. Thank you for everything you were.

Pre-Travel Panic

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

I’m writing this on my way to work Thursday morning. Usually I write my posts Wednesday and schedule them to go live Thursday, but that didn’t happen this week. 

Last night, we stayed up late doing chores and wrapping gifts and planning what we’re packing for our weekend in Minnesota. I’m feeling a little frazzled and overwhelmed. This is my least favorite part of travel: the pre-travel anxiety that my brain so loves to latch onto. 

Tomorrow morning I pick up our rental car. Tomorrow afternoon we hit the road. Once we’re actually underway, chances are I’ll be far less anxious. Until then, though…

Thankfully, we’re getting together with some of our favorite knitters tonight. On the one hand, this means we won’t be packing until late tonight. On the other, though, it’ll be a good distraction from my anxious brain. 

Tiny Happy Thoughts

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

I’m still feeling pretty tired this week, but I think I’m slowly adjusting to the colder weather and darker days, and (hopefully) coming out of the funk I’ve been in for the past few weeks. It’s been a good week, overall, and I have a few things I’m smiling about:

  1. Our new passports arrived on Saturday! My partner and I took last Monday off from work to get passports squared away (we needed to reapply in person since we were both changing names and gender markers). We paid for expedited service, because we wanted to be sure they were done before the end of the month. They estimated the wait time at two or three weeks. Five days later, there they were! We’re still waiting on the passport cards and our old passports to come back to us in the mail, but the actual passport books are here. It’s a huge relief to have that done and to know that our applications were approved, because while we were pretty confident we had everything in order, but you never know what’s going to happen with gender-related changes. Also, my passport was from when I was 16, so it’s nice to have one that’s not expired and that actually looks something like me.
  2. We put our Christmas tree up. I have complicated feelings about Christmas (really, I have complicated feelings about celebrating Christian holidays in general), but the lights and decorations have always been some of my favorite parts. We have a fake tree that I got the first Christmas I was in my first apartment by myself, so it’s been around a few years now, but it’s still in pretty good shape. I have more ornaments than will fit on the tree without even figuring in my partner’s ornaments (I got at least a couple every year growing up), so we had to do some thoughtful curating of what we wanted to actually put up. The end result is quite lovely.
  3. We’re planning Christmas travel. We’re going to take a whirlwind trip north to Minnesota over Christmas weekend. We won’t really get to see friends, but we’re seeing both of our families (something I would not have predicted had you asked me two months ago). So that’ll be an adventure.

Exhausted

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

I’m tired this week. I don’t know if it’s the weather, or the shorter days, or regular old Bipolar bullshit, but I feel like I’m spending most of my time completely exhausted.

In light of that, this is going to be a short blog, but I’m going to try to make it a relatively happy one, because I’m sure we could all use a little light this week. So here’s a list of three reasons I’m smiling today:

  1. My partner and I were able to get our passport applications in earlier this week. It took us a couple of tries to find a location where we could do it, but once we got to the right place, the woman who helped us was wonderful. It ended up being a lot less of a chore than we expected.
  2. The new Mouths of Babes album. Because I backed the Kickstarter, I got to download the album early (the official release date isn’t until next month). It’s SO GOOD. I’m listening to it as I write this. I expected nothing less than excellent from them, of course  and they delivered!
  3. The Slow Holler Tarot. It’s been a great week for Kickstarter rewards arriving! I backed this Kickstarter last year, and as of last night, the deck is finally in my hands. It’s everything I was hoping for and then some.

    Slow Holler Tarot

    I got the Kickstarter-only option of a canvas case, and wow! It’s beautiful.

Three Years

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

Yesterday marked three years since I started this blog!

The fact that I’ve managed to write weekly posts for three years running with only a handful of missed weeks continues to amaze me. I often don’t know what I’m going to say when I sit down to write these posts. My life is not often terribly exciting or eventful (which is exactly how I like it – I am a creature of habit and routine), and it often feels like I don’t have much to talk about. But it still feels like a worthwhile exercise to make myself follow through each week.

Three years and a handful of weeks ago, I took my first shot of testosterone. I started this blog as a chronicle of my experience with transition, but it’s morphed over the years into something slightly different – still generally self-indulgent and focused around my life and experience most of the time, but it’s been less about transition directly and more about life generally, because I came to realize that, really, there weren’t weekly milestones in my physical transition to document. Broadly, it’s very exciting, but in the day-to-day, it’s really a rather boring process, and doesn’t make for very good blog fodder.

I appreciate those of you who come back each week to take a peek at the parts of my life that I share here. There aren’t huge numbers of you, but you come from all over the globe, and that’s pretty cool. Thanks for reading, and I hope you’ll join me for another year of Accidental Fudge!

#NoDAPL

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

The day this post goes live is the day of Thanksgiving in the US. I haven’t been big on Thanksgiving for a few years – I think it’s pretty outrageous to tell the story of Native Americans helping white settlers to survive and leave out the part about how the white settlers turned around and committed genocide against the folks who were there first. But this year, as we watch repeatedly the attacks of rich white oil interests against Native/Indigenous water protectors at Standing Rock (most recently with water cannons in freezing weather)…I’ve seen it suggested that this is ironic. I think it goes quite a bit beyond irony at this point. The truth is that white colonists never stopped oppressing Native/Indigenous people in America. We need to own that. We can’t ignore or erase that history. And we need to look at what concrete steps we can take now to do better, because simply sitting around feeling guilty doesn’t do anyone any good.

Author, activist, and all-around excellent human S. Bear Bergman posted this on Facebook yesterday:

Dear Facebook: can we talk about “thanksgiving”? As a Jew, I cannot stomach celebrating genocide and also as a Jew, I really get how “everyone has the day off” ends up being where gatherings go because the world grinds to a total halt. And yet, this national holiday has a revolting origin and the US Gov’t is RIGHT NOW terrorizing Native/Indigenous folks off their land. AGAIN.

So, how about this harm reduction proposition? If you’re going to do it, send a percentage of what you spend to travel and feast to protect the people protecting their land and all of our water. Shake down your relatives for money. If there’s a table you will sit at, make it a Thing at the table. Aunt Petunia might even surprise you.

I think Bear’s suggestion is a good one. Since the table I sit at today will be the one in my kitchen, alone with my partner, I am choosing to shake down everyone who reads this blog for money instead. And to make it extra easy for you to participate, here are some links:

SacredStoneCamp.org: There are links on this page to donate supplies or funds to the camp, as well as a link to donate to the camp’s legal defense fund.

Standing Rock Medic + Healer Council: Links to donate medical supplies, funds, and/or herbal remedies for use by the medics and healers at Standing Rock.

Mni Wiconi Health Clinic Partnership at Standing Rock: Donate to support the creation of a free clinic at the camp.

Highs and Lows

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

via Mochimochiland on GIPHY

It’s been a rough week. I’m trying not to wallow in grief, because I feel that I have a responsibility to be ready to stand up for my fellow humans who don’t have a level of privilege that even gives them the option to wallow. As an introvert and a generally non-confrontational person, it’s hard not to feel totally paralyzed.

So I am starting small. I have two coworkers with trans or non-binary kids, and I am knitting things for both kids. I am commuting without headphones, so that I’m more alert and ready to stand up to harassment on transit. My partner and I are figuring out what we need to do to take care of each other.

I am grateful that despite the fact that all hell seems to have broken loose, I am in a pretty okay place personally, and well-supported by friends and chosen family. I am less afraid for myself than I am for a lot of the people around me, which is certainly a privileged place to be in.

In the midst of all of this, last Friday I hit one month post-op. I didn’t even realize it until I was about to go to bed. I’m still feeling really good about the decision to have surgery, and I’m really grateful I was able to do it when I did, but it’s hard to feel particularly celebratory when it feels like the whole country is going to pieces. Still, I hope you’ll permit me the small self-indulgence of a selfie from Friday, because I am pretty happy with how I look these days:

One month post-op

One month post-op

Through Grief and Gritted Teeth

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

I’m writing this Wednesday morning, as I work from home and try to process the fact that Donald Trump was just elected as President of the United States.

I posted on Facebook earlier that I have wanted my whole life to believe that people are basically good, but that this election is causing me to call that into question more than I ever have before. This should not have been a close race. A blustering white supremacist who brags about sexually assaulting women should never have even been in the running. But this is reality for all of us now. And if I listen and pay attention, I can see that the terror that’s trying to defeat me today is a terror that a lot of people (particularly anyone who’s not a white, cisgender male) were facing long before Tuesday night. Trump didn’t win out of nowhere. These societal rifts have existed for a long time; this election has just brought to light a lot of ugliness that we (white people in particular) have been all to willing to turn a blind eye to. The fact that it currently appears that Hillary won the popular vote but lost the electoral vote doesn’t change this.

It’s scary out there. I want to hide. I’m fighting back tears every few minutes. My impulse when I’m afraid is often to shut down.

But I can’t do that. Yes, I am queer and trans, and I have personal concerns in this political climate. But I am a white person who operates in the world as a man, and that means this is all going to affect me less than it will affect many other people. I have a responsibility to stand up for those people more adversely affected than myself.

To all of you out there who are Black, or Latinx, or Muslim, or Jewish…to all of you who are disabled…to all of you who are women, or non-binary, or somewhere in between…to everyone who feels not only disenfranchised by these election results but also afraid for your safety as you move through the world: I see you, I love you, and I stand with you. I am not perfect, and I am non-confrontational by nature, but I intend to do everything in my power to stand up for you at any opportunity. I am going to do my best to remember that although I am afraid, your worth as fellow human beings is far more important and powerful than that fear. I’m seeing a lot of #LoveTrumpsHate going around, but that’s only true if people in positions of privilege get off our asses and work to level the playing field.

Heigh Ho, Heigh Ho, It’s Back to Work I Go…

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

Monday marked my first day of work after a three week absence for surgery and recovery. I worked from home to catch up on emails, and was back in the office on Tuesday.

When our office manager saw me Tuesday, he asked if I’d been bored taking so much time off.

I wasn’t.

It was really, really wonderful to not have to worry about work for a few weeks. The fact that I came back to an office packed pretty much wall-to-wall with computers and peripherals that need to be re-homed (which is not my job, but part of our department’s function sometimes), nearly preventing me from even getting to my desk, did not help to ease the transition back. I’ve felt claustrophobic in my windowless, packed office, achy and tired from so much extra activity, and just generally grouchy.

Still, it’s been nice to see the enthusiasm of coworkers at having me back in the office. Someone informed me on Tuesday that when she told her team I was back, they applauded.

I’m still healing well, although I’m trying hard not to push myself too much with being back at work. The last thing I want is to set myself back to the point where I need to take more days off from work, because I burned through all of my remaining personal and sick time for the three weeks I already took. I’m definitely in the place where I feel like I have more energy than I do, which means I crash a bit at night, and mornings feel like a challenge (although challenging mornings are sort of par for the course for my entire life).

Because I’m feeling like I have my energy back for the most part, and because I’m increasingly happy with how my body looks as it heals, I’m getting really excited about the prospect of self-care in the form of exercise. The problem is that I can’t really exert myself yet, and so I have all of this motivation to work out and very little ability to act on it for the next two or three weeks, by which point the motivation may or may not still be there. Meanwhile, I’m researching various gym and fitness program options and trying to figure out what my budget is for that.

The most exciting news from my week was that I learned that my insurance officially paid for surgery. I may still have a small portion to pay depending on how the hospital billed, but the $30,000+ bulk of the surgery has been covered, and that is an enormous relief!