New Clothes

I'm starting to feel like I look good. I'm more confident. I've got more spring in my step. I'm excited to go out. I also am in need of a new wardrobe due to losing a packet of weight. I like new clothes.... always have. It's kind of a guilty pleasure. Though I love also the worn-in t-shirts of ten years plus, and the tracksuit pants for slacking around on a winter morning that are so old there's not an ounce of elastic left in them.... Mmmmm. New clothes are just brilliant for feeling spiffy.

Coming Out/In

Today I came out as trans to some of the guys I've worked with for years and grown to think of as good friends. It was far harder than coming out to my workshop counterparts - I haven't known them or loved them for long at all and therefore can take or leave whether they like me or care at all. The guys today, though... I've known them for longer and don't want to lose them.

Typically I put myself through hell before telling them. I was nervous as hell. I was trying to escape my own ultimatum to do it today, before I take my second shot, before I go too far into my changes to be being polite about it and more like treating them as an afterthought. But... it's one thing to think Well if they can't handle it they're obviously not friends and completely another to face the thought of losing them as friends but still having to face them at work.

Also typically, it appears I put myself through hell for nothing. Everyone was great - no stars and banners, no shock, no turning away. Just a calm response of Whatever makes you happy. You're still Vic. I love this industry. What a great bunch of guys.

Helmet Hair

I used to love caps. I still do. But now.... I have to be able to commit to wearing them all day. There is just no room for off and on with them any more. The hair does not put up with it.

The hair misbehaves. It is already protesting that I don't like it's cowlicks being wild and awkward. I try to tame them with product. I chop them. They fight grimly and mock my attempts. Introduce a cap into the equation and they are stirred up to new heights of disobedience. If the cap is coming along, it is to stay all day and lock the disobedience away from public viewing.

Enter the worst of all into the equation: the necessary hat. The work helmet. Where all element of choice is removed. Must wear helmet.... most definately will come out with bad hair.

"So You're Going Down the Trans Path, Hey?"

Wow. How do I write about something so deep in me and do it justice?

Hmmm. Maybe I'll leave that one for later. For the moment I'll just state the facts.

I've changed my name, driver's license, work details, bank details, even my fucking gym membership. When I think I'm done, yet another letter will turn up with my old name on it. Some systems will let me change my gender marker and title, some won't. It will get better eventually, with a bit more fight if I can muster it up, or at least when I take the surgery path.

I started testosterone on the 28th of February this year. Just over two weeks ago.



I've found it most difficult to tell the people that I care about the most. I find it hard to even organise my thoughts around how to say it sometimes. But... I'm still Vic, right?

Now listening:

I've been on a music binge lately. Actually, I think that every day should be filled with a background of music... So maybe, rather than call it bingeing, I've been returning to a more natural state of order.

Surround sound. What a great combination of words. I bought a nice little system for my laptop. Now the loungeroom of my brightly coloured little living space is now truly a home. 4:15am and I'm already out here grooving! Take that, motherfuckers!

So here's some of the top choices for the moment:



Foster the People - Call it What You Want. A classic pump-me-up song. There's a particular stretch of road I drive before work that I now associate with this song because I've played it so many times as an energy kick to get the day rolling.



The Black Keys - Little Black Submarines. This is from the latest album, with the hit Lonely Boy on it. In fact, the entire album is an absolute pearler. I'll be driving down a haul road, filthy and fucked off after a day in the pit, and bashing the hell out of the steering wheel to that fantastic rum beat in the last section.

Socks And Vibrators Don't Mix

When your ex packs all your stuff from the bedroom into bags and leaves them out front of what used to be your home, just check - before you throw it in storage for four months - that your jelly sleeve vibrator IS NOT NEXT TO A SOCK. The two may become one.

Safety Plus

An emergency stop button on a drilling machine...

Brand New Year, Happy New World

I'm back home after a lightning trip to bring in the New Year with IcePick and KelSuperStarSinger, surveying my surroundings and being happy with what I have.

Jonah is looking out the window. He plays a game with the three little dogs who border our flat. They like to hunt him from window to window and bark whenever they come across him. Jonah feels that he has the upper hand, because jump and carry on as much as the little tackers like to, they can't get past the fence or anywhere near him... and he knows it.

He'll lounge around on the sill and look down his nose at them for a while until they get bored. Then abruptly he'll disappear and reposition himself at another window. Fun and entertainment for all, except maybe the neighbours!

Brutus the oversize goldfish is wriggling away in his not-so-clean tank. It seems like he gives an extra happy wriggle whenever he sees me. The guy is a legend. He floats around giving a fuck off world I can't be bothered look until his light comes on late in the morning, and then it's all wriggle and happiness until about eleven at night when the light switches off again.

I have a guitar beside me on the lounge and plenty of friends to talk to. I have a job that is interesting and cool and pays well. I have goals to set and bridges to burn.

Life is good.

End of another year

I'm not going to see the fireworks spectacles anywhere.

I'm not going to wear a stupid mass-produced hat with too-tight elastic and the staples barely holding it together.

I'm not going to have one of those god-awful noisemaker things hanging out of my gob, and I'm certainly not going to explode any party poppers.

I will try to count the countdown in real-time, rather than join in with the pissed over-excited crowd that always rushes it exponentially the closer they get to one.

I'm not going to hug random people I've never met.

I'm not going to have a million facebook photos of me with some other person.

I will, however, farewell a rather shite year with my good friends and contemplate the goals I will set to make the coming one a tad more enjoyable.

Tickled

Yesterday I worked with just one bloke all day. We got paired up to do menial shit. It's boring as hell, but it's menial shit that has to be done none the less. My method is to just hook in and make it go away as quick as possible.

Today will be the same story, because we're not finished that pile of work yet.

The problem is not the work. It's the guy I'm with to do it.

See, normally I can work pretty well with people I don't like. Sometimes the case is that I don't like their personality but they're a hell of a worker. Sometimes it's the opposite - they can't organise their work at all but it's compensated by the fact that the conversation has you smiling all day. I try to find some aspect that is at least tolerable about them, if not truly likeable.

But this guy... Well, he's just tickled me with the dislike feather all over. Depressed conversation that is constant, not much knowledge of the work even though he says constantly how good he is at it, thick as a fucking plank, and top it all off he's plainly trying to assert his alpha maleness over me. Bahaha.

Boring. Fucking. Idiot.

Today I will snap the dislike feather into pieces.

Meme continued...

Carrying on with another installment in Maria's mammoth meme. There's already been a part one and a part two, and I still have't scratched the surface of the amount of questions really!

6) WHAT DO YOU WANT MORE THAN ANYTHING RIGHT NOW?

More beer.

7) WHO DO YOU MISS?

My sister.

8) IS ANYONE IN LOVE WITH YOU OR HAS A CRUSH ON YOU?

I believe my girlfriend is in love with me. I might have to check since that fart I dropped next to her on the lounge this morning...

9) WHO WAS THE LAST PERSON YOU KISSED?

My girlfriend. In fact, apart from my niece, and occasionally my cat, she's been the only person I've kissed in a long time.

10) WHAT IS YOUR MIDDLE NAME?

Not even the tax department knows that one.

11) THE BEST TV SHOW EVER CREATED?

Bones. She's smart, awkward, incredibly gorgeous, and did I mention that combination of smart and incredibly gorgeous?

I kind of killed my enthusiasm for this one after watching DVDs of the entire series one episode after another over several nights and weekends. The writers have so much fun with that character - any chance to dress her up and put her into a weird situation and it happens. One episode has her running around dressed up as Wonder Woman, diverted from a dressup party and off to solve some crime or another.

Second is Masterchef Australia - purely because the judge Matt Preston is briliant. He is witty, sauve, a great food journalist and has an impeccable sense of style.

Here's a quote from an interview with him:

If you were having any three people, alive or dead, over for dinner, who would they be and what would you cook for them?

If I was working it would be:

Catherine de Medici, Jesus and my great (x8) grandmother whose hand-penned 1765 recipe book is one of my most treasured possessions. Together they could solve so many of the “big questions” that I have when it comes to food.

I’d cook them Balinese style roast suckling pig (obviously there’d be some Peking Duck, steamed barramundi or Sichuan style roast lamb belly for Jesus in case he felt more Jewish than Christian), Thai salads and stir fried Chinese noodles because it would be unlike anything they had tried before although great (x8) does have a recipe for oyster sauce and uses a lot of ginger and coriander seed.

If it was about having fun it would have to be:

Oliver Reed to drink with, Nico from the Velvet Underground to sing with and Sophia Loren to make pasta with. We‘d eat the pasta.

On that note, I'm off to watch an episode.

Surf's Up!

Head down the road a couple of blocks and you're at the pub.

If you manage to make it past the tempting wafts of the pub, move on to the little tunnel under the road. After a few dodgey murals, some bad attempts at stencilling - and not to mention the odd suspicious smell - you will pop your head out at the ocean.

Being winter, it's been spectacularly huge the last few days.



As well as the two brave buggers that took it on, you can see one of the ever present line-up of ships waiting to get into the harbour to grab our wares on the cheap and piss off with them. Oh, except when a storm blows up and they miss the entrance and hit the main beach instead.

What the F... Will I Do With My Weekend?

Thank fuck it's Friday. There is no question about being happy to put the last week of uninspiring work behind me. The questions are about the future. I know it will be an ice-breaker with whoever I get paired up to work with today. Standard Friday conversation is always started around what you plan for the weekend.

WHAT THE FUCK WILL I DO WITH MY WEEKEND?

The people around me are not understanding my drive to fill every weekend with activities. They don't get why I want to spend all day outside. They don't share the same constant dreaming for things I could do on the weekend. I think they are somewhat bewildered by it all.

Well. For three years I worked for a pack of wankers who would abuse you if you missed a phone call on the weekend to go to work at the drop of a hat. You were on call twenty-four hours a day and never paid an on-call rate. When you actually did score two consecutive days off your were exhausted and spent most of your awake time on the lounge snoozing anyway.

So weekends barely existed. Now that I'm in a job where I have them I feel like I'm trying to make up for three years of missing out. I'm living in a city that I've barely explored. I now live right near the beach and I've barely taken any photos.

So.

WHAT THE FUCK WILL I DO WITH MY WEEKEND?

Will I walk the couple of kilometres to Glenrock Lagoon because the start of the track is only a few blocks away?

Will I finally go looking for geocaches at night with MisterSham?

Oh yeah, how about I duck into the messed up treasure trove that is the old Jolly Roger site and take pictures of the graffiti in there before they knock it all down? I know last time I wished to get inside and messed up building I wished for far too long and next time I turned around it was gone.

How about sitiing on the beach playing classical guitar? Or even just the backyard?

I could go up to the University to that section we surveyed last week and take photos of the weird fungi I came across while I was kicking around being bored.

Too many things to do, too little time!

More Questions...

I'll carry on with a bit more of Maria's Meme. Maybe today I will get a bit further through the questions than last time.

2) WHAT IS ON THE WALLS OF YOUR BEDROOM?

There used to be a gorgeous huge painting by my girlfriend that smacked you in the eyes from the moment you walked in the door, but we moved it to the lounge area so that everyone could enjoy it. Now there's a hideous built-in wardrobe unit that smacks you in your bad-taste lobe and cries out for customisation.

3) WHAT DOES YOUR MOBILE PHONE LOOK LIKE?

Scratched, dinged up and not even a year old. It's had grease, sweat, dust, rain... and as a combination of the last three, mud caked on various parts in various combinations. I've learned the hard way that paying the extended insurance fee is well worth it.

4) WHAT MUSIC DO YOU LISTEN TO?

Well. Fuck. There are too many genres to cover here, so...

not much Country
not much Opera

I am amused by Metal in it's various pompous forms. (Get over E minor, guys. And dropping your tuning by a semitone or a tone didn't really change your content. It just made those string bends easier, didn't it?)

Jazz has to err on the side of pop to really hold my attention - I mean, if a soloist wanders around for a good ten minutes and can't hint back at the tune at least once or twice I'm bored. I'm lost. I used to think that it meant I didn't have the mind to contemplate jazz properly. Now, I think that it's not so much me. If you wander off and don't link your solo to any good reference points, you're just waffling. You'd fail if it was an essay.

5) DO YOU KNOW WHAT TIME YOU WERE BORN?

Easy. When the world stopped and everybody said Oh Fuck.

A Meme! Holy YAY!

A while a go Maria posted a mammoth meme that had to come out in a couple of parts. Now, I'm going to bust it up even further. Thirty questions? I haven't got the stamina to answer thirty questions
in one sitting? No way can I sqeeze out anywhere near that in one sitting, especially when for some answers I seem to be prone to a form of literary elephantosis.

So here we go. Maybe five a sitting? I'd say five a day, but that would mean giving up the snooze button time religiously. I can't commit to that with any certainty since the cold snap of the last week.

1) ONE OF YOUR SCARS. HOW DID YOU GET IT?

I have a scar on my head. It's this lumpy raised line that will never (as far as I know) go down. It feels funny when I scratch at it, which is often. The story...

I'd been seconded to do a quick pressure job for my absolute favourite of all superintendents, a gruff loud man by the name of Mick. He would grab you, march you to several points that he wanted cleaned up (that all look identical) and fuck off and leave you to it before you could even ask a question. If you cleaned the wrong area you got yelled at. He was a fantastic man who kept you on your toes by the minute.

Anyway, I found myself cleaning a few places in greasy crawlspaces on a time limit. Because there was nobody but me left after he dictated the job and fucked off, I took the rare liberty of taking my hardhat off while I crawled in and worked. I finished, crawled back out, and stood up too early - before the incline of the roof was actually high enough to stand up under. Consequently, I stood up under a set of grease injectors which have adjustment tabs and buried about a centimetre of one into my head.

Fuck that hurt I thought. Dickhead. I touched my head to feel if there was a bump and instead there was blood. Fuck. Fuckitty FUCK. First thing, I went for the bag of rags I'd been dragging around with me and plucked one out. I pressed it onto that patch on my head and then had a look. It came back red. Not just a little. A big, big patch of red.

It's okay I thought. Head wounds bleed far more than others. I'll go get a second opinion.

With that thought I made my move toward the exit out of the belly of the huge machine I was in, off to search for my supervisor at the time, and also my best mate. Cath'll look after it. She'll tell me I'm a dickhead and it's all fine. Head wounds just bleed a hell of alot, that's all..

So I'm on my way out around this big circular area, and who turns up? You guessed it. Mick. Fuck. He'll blow his brain at me. There he is, coming into my area of work, yelling out for me at the top of his lungs to see if the job is done. I leave the blood soaked rag on my head and whack my helmet over it to cover up the evidence. He checks my work, I breathe a releived thanks, Mick and hightail it the fuck out of there to find Cath.

Cath is having lunch in our work truck. I peel off my helmet and rag combination and tell her to look. She's a mother and a horserider. She's been there for all sorts of injuries. She pries my skull and pokes a bit before she turns to one of the other guys and says it's bad. Go get Mick. Oh, shame.

After that it was decided that I should go to the mine First Aid room. These guys rarely have any fun. They have to be there on call all day and all night, have all the training in the world, but really not much actually goes wrong. So when a case like mine comes in they pull out all the stops. I arrived with a rag on my head and walked out with a full under the chin and a few hundred times around bandage. They have remembered my face for the last few years (primarily, I think) because I made them take photos on my phone for me of just how ridiculous their over the top bandaging effort actually was. We laughed a lot despite the situation.

Next came the trip to Singleton hospital to get stitches. It's a reasonably large town, surrounded by industry and mining, with coal and money spewing out of every orifice. Yet this hospital reminds me of the one that was near the tiny little town I grew up in. It was small and pretty backward. The nurse unwrapped my ridiculously bandaged head. She poked around. She remarked that it would need stitches and disappeared for a while. When she came ambling back through the door she was holding a bit of paper, not the stainless steel bowl of accessories that I expected. There was no doctor following her. Oh, that's right. The doctor had already gone home for the day.

The piece of paper she gave me was a map to the nearest doctor's surgery. In there I spent a further several hours waiting (now in the company of my unpleasant boss) before a doctor pried open my already well clotted and dried wound. He put a stitch in and left me to it. The unpleasant boss stood by while I paid for the whole procedure.

Singleton Hospital? I mean, thank fuck a piece of machinery didn't fall on me. Thank fuck my hand wasn't severed. Who knows what the idea there would be? Here's a map to the nearest metal shop. They'll cut it off in the press for you.

2...

No way. I've written enough for today. That'll do.

Lit Up

Our weekend trip to Sydney was primarily to see the Vivid Light Festival taking place around the harbour. I know Dive is going to be salivating in anticipation of Sydney photos, so here are some extremely amateur shots of the Opera House as a starter.



Oooooh!



Ahhhhhhhh!



Oh WOW!



...and other comments similar to those at a fireworks display. Except this doesn't have pungent smoke and the occasional burning chunk falling out of the sky.

Mornings Vic-Style Part I

The alarm starts going off for the morning. The sound begins as a totally foreign one that you can't identify. Actually, you have so much trouble identifying it that you have to lift your head from the pillow, squint your eyes at it and pull your lips back into a peculiar half-mouth grimace. You continue to stare at it until the light materialises from a bleary smudge into almost-focus.

Then, you feel compelled to utter in that high-pitched mostly-asleep voice whatthefuckitstooearly and Idontwannagetup. The alarm is on the other side of the bed, is actually your phone as well, and is actually attatched to the wall via power cable so the thing can charge. In between you and the noisy target is your partner.

You really didn't want to wake her up. It just took you a while to comprehend what was going on. As you gingerly raise yourself up on an elbow to reach (lunge, really, but it doesn't sound so delicate) over her and retrieve it she reaches out, swiftly unplugs it and flips it over her shoulder in your direction. It's still ot over, though. That sound will continue until you can figure out how to hit Dismiss on a touch screen that changes orientation every time you wobble your sleepy hand and is so bright you have to squint at it even more than you did when you first tried to wake up to it.

Next up: Raising your sorry self from under the covers.

Have to admit I'm tempted

Oh, all those things about getting older. The kilos stay on, the eyesight gets worse, the price of beer becomes outrageous, and suddenly you realise you have no idea what all the kids are talking about.

Luckily, Google and Wikipedia are my friends. I can cheat a little. I don't have to pretend that I know any more because I've read the articles and I've clicked the links.

What am I on about? Planking.



It now has it's own Wikipedia definition. Basically we have something that started off small, with the Planking Australia facebook page, but went worldwide extremely quickly because of the whole nature of Facebook (ugh). The Planking Australia page currently has 140,000 followers.

A guy in Brisbane has died after trying to plank on a seventh floor balcony and, surprisingly enough, falling to the ground. Another guy is in a coma after trying to plank on a moving car. Eight people from across three states have been sacked by one retail chain alone for planking at work. Schoolkids have been suspended over it. There are police warnings, statements from the PM, workplace warnings. Though I detest the "fun police" idea and firmly believe it's the stupidity of some individuals that bring things out of control this way.



Really, this one does belong in every workplace safety bulletin. With the plain heading of "Dickhead".

But, I have to admit I'm tempted.

Grrrr:

Lunches this week

Monday: Two apples and a homemade salad

Tuesday: Two mandarines and a homemade salad

Today: Same as yesterday

and expect the same for the rest of the week.

Last week? Exactly the same.

Couple this with walking literally kilometres daily back and forth while carrying surveyor's equipment. Have I lost weight? Hell no.

Is it the modern doom to tread water until you go for personal training?