gratitude

February Reflections

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

It’s the final day of February, and I’m tired. But it’s been an interesting month. Here are some highlights:

  • FAWM, obviously. Unless I miraculously get something done tonight, I’m ending the month with sixteen new songs, plus two that I co-wrote with my partner. I’m pleased with the majority of my songs, and I’m really happy with how our co-writes came out. Collaborating was a new experience for us, and neither of us was sure how it would go.
  • I started seeing a new therapist. It’s going really well.
  • I had some really good times hanging out with friends – I didn’t let FAWM completely take over my life. We had a visit from a Minnesota friend, a birthday party, and I got to play D&D. I am frequently reminded how great my people are. I’m a very lucky queer.

I’m looking forward to getting our apartment back under control in March, and hopefully sleeping more.

Five Years

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I completely missed it when I posted last week, but on Friday, Accidental Fudge turned five! For five years I’ve written and posted a blog almost every week. That feels like a pretty big accomplishment.

Accidental Fudge started as a blog to document my gender transition. I had enough weird and amusing anecdotes in my first month on testosterone that I thought it would be fun to share them with the world. And that was great, to start. It quickly became apparent, though, that there wasn’t going to be a “here’s a weird thing I’ve noticed about my gender” moment every single week. The blog pretty steadily evolved into me telling you all about how my weeks were going – a brief newsletter of sorts. That’s also been great.

Every time the blog is another year older, I think it’s worth pausing to reflect on whether this is still something I want to invest my time in. While I often feel like I don’t have anything of value to say, I do still enjoy the challenge of coming up with something each week. And I love hearing from those of you who comment (either here or on Facebook or in person). It reminds me that I’m part of a much larger community than I sometimes realize.

So thanks, Accidental Fudge readers, for your support. Here’s to five years, and here’s to at least one more!

Low Key

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It’s been a pretty laid-back week. I feel like I don’t have a lot to talk about. But here’s a quick list of a few things I’m grateful for or excited about right now:

  1. Knitting. I am a few hours of work away from being done with the sweater I’ve been working on. I’m hoping to have it done by the end of the weekend. It’s going to be gorgeous.
  2. Good food. My partner and I didn’t do a traditional Thanksgiving feast last week, but that’s not to say we didn’t cook! I think we counted eleven different dishes between Thursday and Sunday. Highlights that we’ve been enjoying all week: slow cooker carnitas, kharcho (a Georgian beef and rice stew), and about three gallons of borsch. We also had steaks cooked in our cast iron skillet one night to celebrate our anniversary, with a couple of hot dish sides. We’ve been eating well, for sure!
  3. Music. I’ve been reminded many times recently how much I love my Old Town School of Folk Music community. Also, my partner and I are both playing sets at an acoustic show on Monday, and I’m very excited for that.
  4. Nerdy friends. Earlier this week some friends and I resumed a DnD game we’d had to put on hold a couple months ago. It’s been so fun to dive back into the world we’re creating together!
  5. Snow. It may be a pain in the ass sometimes, but it sure is pretty.

That’s it for this week. I’d love to hear from you! What are some things you’re excited about right now?

Gratitude

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I’m not big on Thanksgiving as a holiday – it feels like colonialist propaganda, mostly.

However, I can see the value in taking time to be grateful. So here are a few things I am grateful for today:

  1. My partner and I celebrated our 8th anniversary last weekend. I’m grateful to have a partner who gets me, and who I am still having fun with eight years in.
  2. After months of feeling like I was just sort of drifting, I finally feel like I have a little more direction at work. I’m talking with my boss about the future direction of my job tomorrow, so fingers crossed that this continues.
  3. My friends in California have made it through the wildfires and the smoke. I’ve been really worried about them, and I’m glad to see folks are as safe as they could be given the circumstances.
  4. Things are going pretty well with my immediate family. It’s been a long road with a lot of detours and ditches, but I’m optimistic.
  5. I have so many wonderful people in my life. I’m grateful for all of you!
/ Alyxander James / 1 Comment

I’m writing this post on Thursday morning from my armchair at home, rather than from the bus. I have been feeling increasingly crummy every day this week, and this morning I finally woke up feeling definitively sick, so I’m going to work from home and keep my germs to myself.

So, this is going to be a short post today, because my brain is pretty foggy. Usually when I’m feeling like I have nothing to talk about, I go for some sort of list post. So…let’s go with three things I’m grateful for today:

  1. I can work from home. My boss told me I could just take an actual sick day if I wanted to, and I know that I technically can…but I’m almost out of sick time and I have to save my vacation time for Christmas travel. I’m glad to be in a position where it’s possible to do my job remotely when my body doesn’t feel up to commuting.
  2. Things are going better with my family. We’ve worked through the most recent round of hurt and seem to be closer to being on the same page, which feels nice.
  3. I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here yet, but thanks to the adjustments that were made to my med regimen over the summer, my anxiety is much better controlled. So much so, in fact, that I’m able to drink regular coffee again! It had been about two years since I’d been able to handle that much caffeine. As I sit here and sip my coffee this morning, I am grateful for that.

Moments of Gratitude

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I have been struggling a bit this week. Something is wrong with my back – it hurts in ways that make it hard to move, but it gets worse the longer I hold still (like when I’m sleeping). I’m also fighting off a cold, with less success than I’d like. And, as often seems to happen after a vacation, all the little parts of my job that are frustrating and unsatisfying feel magnified right now.

So in light of all of this, I thought it would be a good exercise to focus this blog on a few things I’m grateful for today. In no particular order:

  • Cooler weather. After several days of pretty unbearable heat and humidity that made me feel like I was constantly about to melt, the heat finally broke Tuesday night, and yesterday and today have been lovely. We were able to open the windows in our apartment and air the place out a bit, which has been really nice (and was really necessary).
  • Musical encouragement. We’ve been keeping in touch with some of the friends we made at Song School as a way to encourage each other to keep writing. Also, at my agency’s employee appreciation event on Tuesday, I had the opportunity to perform one of my songs. It went well, and the feedback was really lovely and encouraging.
  • Impending holidays. My favorite part about working for a Jewish agency is all the extra paid holidays we get off. The high holy days are coming up starting in a couple of weeks, and I don’t work a single five-day week in September. I am definitely looking forward to that.

Start Another Year

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On Sunday, I turned 30, and I can’t imagine having a better time doing it.

I woke up a little later than I’d planned, but still early enough to write my morning pages before the day got underway. We went and got breakfast at Smack Dab, one of our favorite local breakfast and coffee spots, and it was a delicious way to kick off the birthday festivities.

Next, we walked over to our neighborhood farmers’ market and picked up a bunch of fresh produce.

After the farmers’ market, we went home and listened to podcasts while we knit. It’s something of a weekend tradition at our house, and it was lovely and relaxing to incorporate our routines into my birthday.

After a couple hours of knitting and podcast-listening, we decided to walk to the restaurant where we were getting lunch. I got to indulge in my favorite gluten-free beer and an incredible gluten-free fancy grilled cheese sandwich.

Our final outside-the-house stop was at Women and Children First, where we each ended up picking up three books and decided to make a pact that we’re not allowed to go back there until we each finish the books we bought.

The rest of the evening was spent with more knitting and relaxing. It was truly a lovely day, and between the day itself and all the sweet messages I received on social media, I felt very loved and very ready to enter into a new decade of my life. Thanks to everyone who made me feel so special!

And as a bonus, I leave you with a picture of the completed LEGO set my partner gave me as a present, which we assembled together last night:

LEGO “Women of NASA” set

Anniversaries

/ Alyxander James / 1 Comment

November is a month of anniversaries.

The beginning of the month marked my four year anniversary of starting testosterone. The day after Thanksgiving was the three year anniversary of my legal name change.

As of the 17th, my partner and I have been together for seven years. It’s been a wild, wonderful ride, and one I don’t intend to get off of anytime soon.

And on this day, four years ago, Accidental Fudge was born. What started as blog about the adventures of transition has morphed into a blog about the adventures of my life in general. I can still count on two hands the number of Thursdays I’ve missed since I started this thing, and that, to me, feels like a significant accomplishment.

I don’t have a whole heck of a lot to write about this week, but I wanted to take a minute to thank all of you who stop by every week to read what’s on my mind. This is a pretty self-indulgent blog, and I never really expected to have any sort of audience. There aren’t a lot of you, but there are a lot more than I expected, and I appreciate you.

In the spirit of what this blog has become, let’s wrap up this post with a handful of happy things from the past week, shall we?

  1. I wrote last week about my general distaste for Thanksgiving/Black Friday. I do, however, like to support local spots on Small Business Saturday. This year I went to four or five different shops in my neighborhood and the surrounding area, and got about 80% of my holiday shopping done. It was exhausting, but I also had fun.
  2. On Monday, I went to see Thor: Ragnarok with a friend. I was not expecting great things, but oh my god, it was wonderful. It’s hilarious – basically slapstick with swords and explosions and superheroes. And there’s gothtastic Cate Blanchett, and…yeah. It was great. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
  3. Yesterday, I took a sick day because I was completely exhausted when I woke up, and felt mildly feverish. Which sounds like a not-so-happy thing, but I slept a ton and had a really relaxing day, which means that I’m feeling 90% better today.

Gratitude Every Damn Day

/ Alyxander James / 2 Comments

It’s Thanksgiving in the US today. The last two years, I’ve posted about my discomfort with this holiday. White colonialism isn’t really a thing I’m into celebrating, particularly when it hasn’t ended and we continue to refuse to own up to that.

This year, I’m thinking about Thanksgiving and Black Friday, and how they relate.

My initial thought was, “oh, what contrast there is between a day that’s ostensibly about gratitude and the very next day that is all about capitalism and the acquisition of stuff.” And then I thought about it some more, and realized that there’s not a lot of actual difference between the two days at all.

Thanksgiving is the holiday where we pay lip service to gratitude and ignore our history of colonialism and the slaughter and displacement of Indigenous people, all fueled by greed. On Black Friday, we have our external demonstration that our values haven’t changed.

People literally die on Black Friday in their quest to get a good deal on stuff they probably don’t need. Let’s put that another way: People literally kill other human beings over stuff they probably don’t need on Black Friday. And we don’t do anything about it. If anything, the craze gets worse every year. Which seems to be the quintessential America way of dealing with preventable tragedy. (See also: the 95 mass shootings that have happened in the US since 1982.)

I don’t want to pay lip service to gratitude; I don’t want to do it one day a year, and I certainly don’t want to save it for a holiday that’s built on lies. I want to be grateful every damn day. To that end, I’ve been trying for the past couple of months to list three things I’m grateful for every morning when I get up and every night before I go to bed. I want to keep an attitude of “thanksgiving” every day of the year.

Part of being grateful is sharing what we’ve got when we recognize we have more than we need. There are links in both of the blog posts linked in the first line of this post to organizations that I’ve suggested donating to on past Thanksgivings; here a few more:

The Marsha P. Johnson Institute

Greater Chicago Food Depository

Chicago Community Bond Fund

Transgender Law Center

Planned Parenthood

 

Grateful, Centered

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My first thought when I sat down to write this week’s blog was to whine, at length, about the horrible day I had on Tuesday trying to get to and from jury duty in the suburbs without a car. But I am trying to be a more grateful, centered person, so I’m not going to do that.

I’ve been feeling…a little off, lately. Not grateful or centered. I’ve been feeling frazzled about work, questioning if this is really where I want to be, or if I’m just staying here because of the good boss and good health insurance, and whether that actually matters. I’ve been having a lot of complicated feelings about gender and identity and privilege and what that all means (I regret none of the decisions I have made, but living in a world married to the concept of binary gender is frustrating). I’m trying to balance long-term planning (I’ve charted out how to pay off my credit card by 2020) and living in the moment. To be stable and flexible. And I feel like I’m not doing a very good job of any of it, like I’m just hanging on as the world spins, desperately wishing it would stop for a few minutes (or days) and let me catch my breath and figure out where I am and where I’m going.

I guess I’m in the midst of a minor existential crisis?

How irritating.

But back to the original point I think I was trying to make…I want to be a more grateful, centered person. I’m not doing a great job of it. But I do feel like the Universe is gently nudging me in the direction, despite the fact that I’ve felt like a cranky mess for the past few weeks. From my no-longer-daily-but-I’m-trying tarot meditations to sweet messages from friends to cute pictures of puppies on the internet, I run into reminders pretty regularly that really, I am okay. Even if I feel off-kilter, even if my allergies are driving me crazy and fogging my brain, even if I feel overwhelmed by a lot of things, even if I don’t know what (or possibly who) I want to be when I grow up, even if there’s plenty in the world at large to be terrified of right now, right now, in this moment, I am okay. And that’s really all I can ask for.