AEROVERACITY

Hah! Wishes do come true. My friend from Boston decided she was in need of an adventure this evening and wanted me at her graduation party, so she is currently driving to the great state of NJ to bring me back home. I will be sitting in the library tomorrow, writing my little fingers off, and then partying away a handful of days with the best people on earth. I can not wait! Here’s to safe travels!

So I have this predicament.

I didn’t know I had such issues until I arrived home. Now, I feel like I am living two lives.

When I’m in Boston, surrounded by academia and friends who share a very theoretical understanding of the world, I make sense. No one hesitates to say things like “she’s so handsome” or to refer to a biological female as a boy or even to say she’s my boi(y)friend. I became so used to the mismatch that it just became normal to me. I presented myself in a certain way, people read that, understood that, and validated me in all the masculine ways that make me feel so good.

I never had a desire to transition because the space I inhabited in the external world was exactly what I experienced inside of myself.

But then I came home. I am inundated with reminders of how I’m a girl, a daughter, a woman… it makes my skin crawl. It makes me feel as if I have two lives. The two worlds completely collided on the car ride home. I was on the phone with a friend who said, “Hi Dylan’s mom”… and I realized in this car, I wasn’t Dylan, I was [my given name], and there isn’t a Dylan’s mom… because my mom has no conception of who that person is and can’t recognize me as Dylan even when I’m standing right in front of her.

Even worse, she doesn’t call me my nickname at home… she calls me by my full name. Which is strange and feminine and something I have no connection to. Half the time I don’t respond because my brain doesn’t recognize it as me. I tried telling her to just call me my nickname (which is my name minus the -any)… we even had a discussion about how I have a group of friend’s who call my Dylan all the time, who don’t even know who [given name] is… but it seemed to go over her head.

Then she asked me if I wanted to become a guy. Actually she said something more along the lines of, just please don’t become a man. I always wanted a daughter and I was never supposed to have another child but you were born and it was like the perfect miracle. I could handle the gay thing, but that would just be too much, I’m too old for this.

No, I don’t want to become a guy. I have no desire to transition but I would like my identity, which is neither male nor female, to be recognized for a minute here. I can be comfortable as a female if you can validate and embrace my masculinity. I really don’t have any problems with my body until people start making them. I don’t want to be jammed into the binary and your world will not fall apart if you are without the clear cut boxes and categories that have always made everything so easy to understand. I don’t want to be a mother, I don’t feel like anyone’s daughter or sister or girlfriend… I want to be a parent, someone’s child, someone’s sibling, someone’s partner; I want all of those roles free of gender.

I attempted to have a discussion with her about how those are all just words. If I called her by her first name rather than mom, our relationship and love for one another wouldn’t change. “Mom” is just a label she likes because she identifies with it and feels like a mom inside. When I call her mom, she FEELS good because she is validated in a role she very much enjoys and finds personhood in. Just like if she called me her son, or Dylan, or whatever I felt good about… I’d still be the exact same person inside. She was convinced otherwise. She said if I was her son, she didn’t feel as if we’d be able to have the same conversations or connection. An apple doesn’t become an orange just because you call it such… it’ll still taste the same. I’ll still be the same kid.

Unless I’m in a place where I know people understand who I am, then I can really care less what you call me… she, he, girlfriend, boyfriend, daughter, woman, boy… they’re meaningless (or maybe intelligibly resignified) in spaces where people conceptualize them in deeper ways.

Sigh.

The wedding is just making it worse because everything is so gendered. Every time my mom says, well your brother is going to do X Y or Z because he’s my son… I have to bite my tongue. It hurts. I am trying so hard to respect that this is her wedding, it should be how she wants and it’s already amazing that she’s totally fine with me wearing a tux and having my brother and I walk her down the aisle but something about it all still hurts.

I’s hard to accept that the person you love most has this really deluded vision of who you are. Sometimes I feel like I’ve disappointed her and that hurts the most. It makes me feel like she doesn’t love me; she loves someone I was or someone she wanted me to be.

Please let me go home. This isn’t it anymore.

I can not believe another year of college has already flown by. In fact, I’m pretty much in denial about it; avoiding finals, avoiding saying goodbye to friends, avoiding packing up my room yet again. I think the hardest thing about college is making new friendships each year and not knowing what’s going to happen once everyone starts their REAL live somewhere with significant others, jobs… no I take that back, careers, homes, families. It’s all kind of scary. I guess it’s kind of like saying goodbye to high school and yet leaving high school to me meant a reprieve, freedom, the chance to find a place for myself in the world. I would have spit on the front door of that place if I could have. Leaving college is going to feel more like a baby bird, wings still wear from cracking out of the egg, being kicked out of the nest prematurely. I’d pitch a tent on the front steps of our main academic building and grow old there if I could. It’s been so safe here and that really is the right word; safe to grow, safe to create an identity, safe to learn and explore and make mistakes. I’ve met amazing friends here, the kind of friendships that I thought only existed in the lives of fictional characters and life altering mentors who I can’t imagine not seeing every day. I hope next year will go by slower than slow, though I know it won’t, each year just gets faster and faster. I guess there is always the possibility of settling down here and starting my life, but with future studies on the horizon, who knows where I’ll end up… wherever my acceptance letter takes me, I suppose.

So, seven days are left. Six really. I have to write a short meta-paper about my TA experience in order to complete my internship, and I have two exams on Thursday. I can’t believe I am going to be tested on the definition of S/M, higher & lower order desires. the problems with femme femme-theory. One might think I wouldn’t have to study… but unfortunately, the lived experience doesn’t always translate into the theoretical. Then I’m headed back to New Jersey to hunker down with lots of LSAT books and my rambunctious puppies. Other plans for the summer include getting my license (finally!), my first public debut in a tux for my mom’s wedding, coming back to Boston for a month in June hopefully… who knows what else. Once I have my license I hope to make a lot of trips here and there to see what my friend’s lives are like when they’re in their element at home. I also want to get better at skateboarding, take long bike rides, and not sleep the days away.

Oh! I bought my first legal drink at a restaurant/bar last night. My ex and I spent the day together, first attending this crazy hippie festival over in the gayborhood, with great street vendors and awesome music. Afterward we got all dressed up, her in a great blouse and blazer and me in a shirt and tie, and went to a place up the street from her apartment that I’ve always wanted to go and drank delicious raspberry mojitos. The food was pretty good as well and it was fun to back in that “I’m on a date” atmosphere. Our waitress was also great for not ID-ing me despite my 15 year old boy appearance. At one point in the meal she said something about “thanks ladies” and then kind of fumbled and looked at me like “ooops, you might not go by that”, but I smiled and said something something funny so she didn’t feel awkward. It struck me as an odd moment though, I can go out here with hair shorter than short (I just got it cut yesterday) in a shirt and tie and still be recognizably female, but I could go out in just my normal sort of androgynous clothes in NJ and everyone is “sir” and “oh is this your son?”. It really made it apparent that people see what they open their eyes to and people in the gayborhood who see all kinds of gender expression look a bit closer than those crazy heterosexists in NJ. Anyway, it was a really nice day spent together and I’m glad we finally got our shit together and hung out.

Today was spent back in 1997 and by that I mean, I found a demo game of Theme Hospital online and have been playing like mad ever since. When I was 10 or 11, I was obsessed with this game and played it on playstation for hours upon hours. I had totally forgotten about it but what a great blast from the past. Now I’m trying to find out how I can buy a copy of the PC version and make it compatible with Windows XP. It will be a great way to waste away those summer hours. Another thing that has been sucking away my time recently is this website on HBO, Voyeur, where you basically watch these little simulated movies of peoples’ lives, without sound. It’s quite the time stealer, especially if you’re into that kind of thing, which apparently I am.

Man, I snatched this Spiced Cider Apple flavored drink mix from the common kitchen the other night (someone was giving it away), and I only took two packets assuming it’d be horrible because let’s face it, students don’t give away much, but damn it’s good. You just blend it into hot water and bam, you’re at some fall festival picking pumpkins with the smell of wet hay under your feet in no time. Mmmm!

Well, I should try to get to sleep at a decent hour so I can head off to the library and be productive tomorrow. I would complain, but with only a week left, I think I’m going to miss it. I’m such a dork!

Discussion with my room mate, Corey, as I was getting dressed this morning and put on my new plaid button down shirt.

Me: “I can’t decide if I like this shirt.”
C: “I dunno.”
Me: “Maybe it’s the colors…”
C: “I just don’t think it’s you”
Me: “What do you mean?”
C: “I mean… you look like a dyke.”
We both laugh.
C: “You’re supposed to look like a boy!”
Me: “Right right, whatever, I’m wearing it anyway.”
C: “I love that calling you a dyke is a bad thing.”

Living in a dorm really exposes how strange the human race can be. Tonight, I wandered into the communal kitchen to retrieve my ice cream and switched on the light as I entered. Since it was off, I was pretty startled when I almost ran smack dab into a girl as I made my way towards the fridge. She was standing in the kitchen, in the pitch dark (it’s midnight mind you) and eating from a jar of peanuts, looking totally disheveled, possibly sleep walking, maybe suffering from end of the semester mania. It was also a bit strange because why would she be eating peanuts in kitchen anyway? They don’t need to be refrigerated so keep them in your room and munch until your heart’s content. No need to startle the late night ice cream eaters. Either way, when I left, I didn’t turn the light off because I thought that might just be weird… but I watched through the glass and she turned it off again and proceeded to sit down with her jar of nuts. I half shrugged and laughed to myself, then went back to my room with my ice cream and tried to remember what it looked like when I closed it last night. You can’t really trust that someone didn’t creep in during the night and steal a few bites thus depositing their slimly saliva into your delicious ice cream. I kid you not, it was a huge problem on my floor last year. One would assume that might deter me from eating it, but it doesn’t. Not at all. Mmmm, delicious Mint Chocolate Cookie.

Also strange, the other morning I discovered that someone had broken the hand held shower head off and not in a way that might seem normal. No, I’m talking the whole damn thing was cracked off in such a manner that I couldn’t replicate it if I tried. As a result, when I turned the shower on in my sleepy eyed stupor, not noticing that it was broken, it shot off like a geyser exploding for the first time in years. Good thing no one knows who the culprit of that mishap is as I’m sure there are now many many sexually frustrated ladies on the floor. Poor things. My major complaint has nothing to do with sexual fulfillment but is instead more practical in nature; there are now three showers on a floor of 20 something women. Ugh. I’m just glad my schedule is completely off beat from everyone else’s.

Ok, I should go to sleep. I’ve been suffering from severe insomnia these past few nights… though eating that half a pint of ice cream just now, probably won’t help.

Courtesy of Essin’ Em, I snagged this survey and changed some of the lamer questions. This blog needed some sex again… remember the days of erotica and sexually energized entries about dates and such? Miss those days? God damn, me too.

1. Sex in the Morning or Sex at Night?
Oh! I just recently had this discussion. I am totally a sex at night person, because I feel like that’s just sort of natural progression…. get in bed, take off clothes, have sex, shower in the morning… but! I really am a sex any time person… if I woke up and my partner was already messing around, I’d shake the sleep right out and totally be into it. Quickies during the day are also much enjoyed.

2. Best Sex Music - (the choices were bad)
Many girls have told me that I make awesome mix CDs for sex. Sometimes they are romantic and quiet, sometimes they are loud songs with heavy steady back beats to thrust to. Either way, some of my favorites are Esthero, Imogen Heap, Iron & Wine, Seabear… Robin Thicke.

3. Naughty Pics or Naughty Home Videos?
Why must I choose? Pics are super hot when they’re given in the right context and not over done in a desperate way… home videos are nice too.

4. Fabulous Sex With: Dr Doug Ross or Dr Greg House?
Well I like women and would prefer nurse Hathaway or Jeanie Boulet, but I’d take Doug Ross over Greg House anyday.

5. Vibrator or Dildo?
I prefer to call it my cock and not be on the receiving end of either.

6. Bedroom Sex: Lights Off or Lights On?
I like ambiance… not so bright that it feels like the doctor’s office, but I like to be able to see my partner’s face, their body, the shadows cast across the room… total darkness can be interesting I guess, but I like to see what’s going on. I’m very visual and not at all self concious.

7. Word Preference: Pussy or Cunt?
Neither. I don’t find either hot… I’m not sure what I call it, but it’s never either of those. I think I avoid all words if at all possible because let’s face it… pussy, cunt, vagina… not hot.

8. Spanking Over the Knee or Spanking Only During Sex?
A little smack on the ass here or there is hot… during sex is nice too, I’m into some smacking.

9. More Exciting: Sex in an Elevator or Sex in an Aeroplane?
Both seem a bit cramped… but the elevator would probably be more exciting to my exhibitionist side. You just never know when that door will pop open or who will be on the other side.

10. Favorite Porn Star?
I don’t usually find anyone in porn attractive… that is, until I started watching Crash Pad. I’m all about Dylan Ryan… especially in the role of hot femme top.

11. Word Preference? Cock or dick?
COCK for sure, but sometimes I throw dick around. Dick just seems very bio-penis to me.

12. Put on PJs After Sex or Sleep Naked?
I usually put on boxers and sleep shirtless but I love a naked body pressed up against me all night long. No need for redressing.

13. Rope Bondage or Bondage Tape?
Oh man… I have bondage tape on my desk right now actually, that shit is pretty fun. But I think ropes are a lot hotter, much more tactilely pleasing.

14. Top, Bottom, or Switch?
I’m a top for sure… but I love the dynamics of being with a switch.

15. Sex In The Shower or Sex In The Kitchen?
Oh sex against a cold tile floor in the middle of the kitchen is nice and those counters, sometimes they’re at a really good height… but a hot hot hot shower is also excellent. Hmmm. I’m going to have to pick the shower although the flashbacks to the kitchen floor are making this especially difficult.

16. Which Threesome - Boy/Girl/Girl or Boy/Boy/Girl?
Boy/Girl/Girl… and I’ll be the boy… or gay boy bottom, me, and a girl.

17. Flavoured Oil or Tingling Oil?
Neither… seems messy. I’ll create the tingle and there’s nothing wrong with the taste.

18. Favorite Non-Sexual Object to Make Sexual?
High heels. I have such a high heel fetish.

19. Sex While Strangers Watch or Sex With a Stranger?
Sex while strangers watch… I think the idea of super casual sex is way hot but the reality of sexually transmitted diseases is an immediate buzz kill.

20. Tied to the Bed or to a St Andrew’s Cross?
I’m not getting tied to anything… OK maybe the bed, I could be down with that. I do have a little bottom in me under the right circumstances. Plus, the only cross I know was Jesus’s and nothing about that whole episode seems sexy to me. I don’t mix sex and religion, kthanksbye!

On Earth Day my college gave out little mounds of dirt that they claimed would grow into flowers. I passed by the table without picking one up because I’ve never had much of a green thumb.

After class a few friends and I went outside to enjoy the beautiful sunshine and as I got up to leave, I noticed my friend had left her plastic cup containing the little dirt mound on the ledge. I asked my room mate to take it home so we could give it back to her but once it was home, it of course needed tending to.

So I gave it a little water and remembered to move it to the window sill for some light the next morning. When I checked on it that evening, I noticed a faint white spout, and got pretty excited about how it was actually growing.

Now I’ve become quite attached to it, watering it each day, watching it grow a little taller, brighter green, placing it in the window in the morning and taking it back onto my desk before it gets too cold. I watch how the sprout leans in one direction towards the sun and then I turn the cup, so that it leans the opposite way.

I hope my friend doesn’t inquire about getting it back. I’ve really started to like the little fellas. There’s something about growth and having a hand in it that puts a smile on my face in a really unexpected way. I have no idea what it’s going to turn into, but I look forward to finding out!

Four days old.

Six days old.

After 3:30 today I am officially beginning a much needed four day weekend. Before college I always had my birthday week off as it usually coincided with Spring Break and I thought it was the best present ever. I really did feel as if the school had sat down and planned it out that way just for me. College, however, did not look down upon me with the same glowing smile. This lovely four day weekend also means I will be able to get my much needs hairs cut on Saturday so I can be a handsome birthday boy on Tuesday and hit the bars in style that night!

The real point of this entry, however, is to say that I will be writing this weekend. I need to get back into it because I miss it like crazy. I hope there are people out there still checking up on this place.

Edit- I hate to break promises, but the weather was really beautiful these past few days, I had a lot of time to myself and space to just lay around and think, did some leisure reading and time just seemed to carry me away. I think I’m having trouble articulating feelings and such lately anyway…I’m sort of just blasé… maybe it’s because I’m too busy sprinting that last stretch of classes before summer arrives.

My 21st birthday is on April 22nd. A real landmark into the realm of adulthood. The day all teenagers look forward to. Yet, after a night long skating adventure, I’ve decided I would like nothing more than a skateboard, a blank one preferably, so I can draw awesome birds on it and stick on amazing queer & socially concious stickers. All the prefabricated designs are way ugly and totally not fitting of my refined style.

Alcoholic beverages would be nice, but really, I’ve been drinking for so many years now, it just doesn’t seem to have as much of a thrill as I thought it would. Growing down sounds much nicer and a skateboard is so conducive to reviving my childhood ways. What a weird life we live… when we’re kids, we can’t wait to grow up, and once we’re adults, we just want to be little again.

However, today proves that I can balance adult life with a childhood spirit rather well, and I think I should do it more often. I woke up around 11:30 and spent an hour or so in bed watching cartoons, I took a shower, ate a lovely omelet and a big glass of milk for breakfast, started my research paper for all of five minutes, spent the entire afternoon in lovely company… around 7:30, I ordered dinner, wrote the paper until it arrived, ate delicious sushi, sat back at the computer for fifteen minutes and then went over to my friend’s apartment… smoked way too many things (none of which were illegal, I may be regressing, but I’m going to be a good kid this time around!), went skateboarding from ten until after midnight, and then came back and busted out the rest of my paper.

It’s amazing that the paper is done because it literally feels as if I spent the day having a ton of fun and doing absolutely nothing I was supposed to be doing… and yet, the paper is REALLY done (I printed it just to be sure), and when I re-read it I realized it’s actually pretty high quality.

Tonight I’m falling asleep way happy.

Tomorrow, I’m writing the next paper, but for now, I’m not even allowing myself to think about it.