Between Butch and Femme

This morning I got dressed without really thinking about it, like most days. I’m not at my best at 7:30 am and usually pick up whatever is topmost on the floor or in the laundry basket. This morning it was my khaki-green shorts (men’s department, Walmart, aren’t I classy?), my green Goliard shirt (not fitted at all), the usual bandanna (red), flip-flops, and Jared Steed’s belt (which he stole from his brother, who stole it from his girlfriend, who stole it from an ex). I stumbled out the door, to my car, and blearily watched two chubby golden retrievers wander about the yard. It wasn’t until after I came home, drank some coffee and ate my breakfast that I finally got a look at myself in the mirror. I looked – not really boy, not really girl? I sort of blinked at myself and then, somewhat startling myself, I said out loud, “I like it best when I look like this.”

I’m not a feminine girl. Not really. Jim, talking in terms of how our relationship is set up, calls me his femme, but that’s different from being a femme. (Likewise, he’s my butch, but that’s different from being butch.) I like skirts and low-cut shirts, I like the way my legs look in heels, but ninety percent of the time I wear jeans and tee-shirts. If I’m going to idly grab something to wear, that’s what I’ll grab… because it makes up a lot of my wardrobe. When I do wear skirts, I’m pretty bad at it. I walk big, I sit with my knees apart, I stand on one leg and run and climb trees. I wear sneakers with them. I also don’t think about what my body looks like. Twice in that last week, someone has commented on how I look, and I’ve been absolutely floored, because I had no idea! I don’t know when my chest is unusually uh… present, as it was the other night dancing, because I pay no attention to it. I just don’t think about it. My body isn’t something I consider, I don’t check it in mirrors, I don’t follow that stereotypically feminine model of primping and worrying about my appearance. I don’t really consider myself as much of a girl, although I mostly love being one.

(Except for my period. For a week every month, I despise being female. I wish I could be something else, I hate my body, I’m uncomfortable and out of control and angry and upset. That’s the only time I feel dysphoric and like my body is wrong. For a really long time, I had a lot of trouble believing that any XX person could welcome or enjoy or even be neutral about having their period. It continues to horrify me every month.)

I’m not terribly masculine either, though. My hair is too long, I like skirts too much. I enjoy flirting my hips and although I am dying to borrow and wear Jim’s old binder (I long for a degree of androgyny some days), I love my curves. I can never quite bring myself to shave my head, and although I love my boy’s clothes, most of what I own is pretty fitted. Although I walk big and firmly, I swing my hips quite happily. I’ve recently discovered the joy of well-fitted bras and how good they look. I don’t own a lot of plaid (and yes, there is my stereotypical lesbian comment for you).

On the lesbian spectrum, I lie between butch and femme. There isn’t a word for this, really, but I think there should be.

On the gender spectrum… I’m female but not necessarily feminine. I consider myself a girl – although solidly a tomboy, because I don’t subscribe to a lot of the things that are considered girl/lady traits. I don’t want to, so I play with my gender. I think about how I present it.

But… for me, this is still a casual thing. It’s just that – a playground. At the end of the day I’m a cisgendered queer female. (Cisgendered simply means your physical sex matches your gender; therefore, not only am I XX, but I’m a woman.) And I present as such most of the time, which is what gives me the freedom to sometimes mess with it. There aren’t going to be consequences because it’s not a permanent way of living, it’s just something that gives me a lot of pleasure to occasionally delve into. I am not trans, I’m not genderqueer. I am comfortable in my body most of the time. I like it, I like the way it looks, the way it feels to be inside it.

And I feel like gender isn’t something I should be talking about, that it’s weird for me to talk about playing with my gender when there are people who struggle with it every day. Jim deals with it all the time, trying to figure out how to present, and whether it’s okay to change his name, balancing personal need and family opinions, who is actually trans. It’s weird to say I don’t really want to be just be a girl, I want to have elements of male and female. Do I have the right to want that?

I think I do, though. I think everyone should be able to play with what they are, and how they present themselves to the world at large, whether they’re cis or trans or something entirely else. I’m just a person who wants to be in a way that makes them comfortable. I want to sometimes bind my chest and pass as a boy — not because I want to be a boy, but because I want to acknowledge what is masculine about myself.

Weirdly, it’s dating Jim – who is a transgender/genderqueer-tending-male individual who looks very masculine and passes on a regular basis – that has let me start thinking about my own gender and playing around with it. He offered to lend me a binder, is going to help me dress boy, talks to me about how he thinks about gender, and lets me work out how I do. I really value it.

I am so much more aware of how I do gender these days.

Later: heteronormativity, horse shows, and humming.

Why I’m Called Bones (Explanation Two)

Short explanatory post.

Reason one is because, well, I remind Jim of Bones McCoy — but I’ve mentioned that. Reason two has more to do with one of the things I collect. I collect Breyer Horses, model dragons, books — and bones.

Well, bones and fur and feathers. I currently have Badger (she’s a badger skull), a small rodent skull from Tasmania, five unidentifiable leg/vertebrae bones from Tasmania, two horse teeth. A rabbit skin. A fox tail. An Aussie possum tail. A number of feathers that I found out on my dog walks, some shells. A keel bone (Jim gave this too me, and I have yet to put it out, since I FORGOT IT AT HIR HOUSE). I have a small butterfly knife as well, a magpie-beer bottlecap from Oz, a smooth white stone. A quill pen.

I desperately want more skulls. I love the lines of them, and stroking the long slope of their noses, and thinking about they were when they were alive, and touching the hinge of the jaw and the join of the neck. I took Anatomy and Physiology in high school and I’ve never forgotten learning how to look at bones.

I am waiting until I am out of the house to buy more, so my mother doesn’t squawk. I like predator-looks better, so I’m thinking ‘yote. What I really want is hyena, though — or cougar. My other two totems – Przewalski’s and Badger – are both represented on what Caroline used to call with mild horror “the shrine”. I want my third!

Coming up: gender.

“Why Does It Never Say Anything About Utilities?”

Chalkey and I are apartment hunting. We’re hoping/planning to move to Boston in the fall, and this means spending a lot of time on Craiglist, HotPad, and the phone – not to mention the street, both through Google Maps and physically. Location-wise, I live about 45 minutes outside the city right now, so I can actually go and look at places.

It also means I can actually PICTURE where we might be living. Now, I love Chalkey, but he does tend to email me suggestions located in, say, Springfield. Or Worcester. And there ARE jobs all over Massachusetts, but I want to be within spitting distance of Boston – preferably on the subway system, but I’d do commuter rail as well (I think Chalkey wants to be within spitting distance of SOME GIRL ;DDD). All the jobs I’m applying for are in and around Boston, and I have a lot of friends there. There are some Wooster grads – both Chalkey and I just graduated – and a big student community, and music, and art… Boston’s just a good place. I think we can both be happy there.

…and I must admit that the opportunity to be close to Jim, who’s going to be living in Norwood, is a major draw for me.

The most frustrating part of this whole search is what the ads don’t include. I require certain knowledge! Here’s what I would, ideally, like to know:

• Where is it? What street? Is it close to public transportation?
• How many rooms is it?
• How much does it cost per month?
• Is it furnished?
• Is heat included? How about water? Or electricity?
• Are pets allowed? What kind of pets?
• Is there a finder’s fee?
• Who owns the building? Does the owner/landlord live there too?
• What’s the move-in date? Is it flexible?
• What is the neighborhood like? The other tenants?

HOWEVER.

The only thing I really, REALLY get angry about not knowing right up front, every time, is this: are utilities included in the rent?

I have no idea why this is left out so often, and not specified either way! It drives me up the wall. Like, flailing. I am forever asking Chalkey, on the phone and through email, “Why does it never say anything about utilities? Isn’t this supposed to be important?”

WHAT IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE.

Contra Dancing = Poetic Cliches, Apparently

I have a huge problem with this.

Contra dancing is an enormously powerful experience for me – because I mostly follow (by which I mean dance the girl’s part), I spend a lot of time being extremely in tune with my partner and following all his or her cues very precisely. In a lot of ways it’s a giving-up of control, something that I hate to do in my everyday life but is also a relief. Dance is a form of meditation for me as well, and expression of joy, and flirtation, and exercise, and a way of courting — I show-off-danced for Jim very early on, although I didn’t realize I was doing it. (Seriously though. I danced blindfolded. It should have been a major tipoff for both of us.)

And because I am at heart a poet – and more on this later, I suspect – I frequently try to write about what it’s like to dance. I’ve succeeded only once admirably, in a short story/vignette called “Surrender”, although I repeatedly try. Something about dancing expresses itself in cliches – I think maybe because there is power in cliches, because everyone says them for a reason, because they are what run through our collective consciousness, because on some level we know they are real and true and powerful. When I say that dancers move like flames, I know both that it’s terribly cliched and terribly accurate. We flicker and twist and our bodies are on fire with it. But to write it that way sounds stupid, and I constantly wrestle with it, because I both want to sound unique and to get across what it’s like.

I danced tonight beneath a thunderstorm that shook the walls of the meeting hall we use for contra, where lightening was lighting up the sky. It was one of the single most powerful experiences I’ve had dancing, and I wanted/needed to write it down. I wanted to tie the thunder and the dancing, and it was hellishly hard – my first go at it contained the phrase “sky shot through with lightening”. When I sent it to Jim, as I often do when I’m futzing around with lines, she pointed out that line as cliched, I tried changing to “struck through”, he said no and suggested running the idea of thread through the poem instead — Jim too is a poet, and much, much better at images than I am. I’m more narrative. I thought she was mad, but tried her suggestion (“strung through”) and discovered to my delight and dismay that it worked rather well.

I think I will keep her — if for no other reason than that because of him, I seem to have found a way to write about dancing.

We dance like thunder

under skies strung through

with lightening, wet-wool-heavy

with water, rain beading

our necks — heatflash flickering,

breathing in the wind, threading through

each other, needle-sharp.

Dammit, Jim, I’m a Doctor…

My boyfriend calls me Bones.

I call her Jim.

(…and frequently I find I must inform her that I am not certain pertinent things, and am in fact something very specific. Her tag here is dammit jim; mine, when I talking about myself, is is dr. bones.)

(And yes. All the tags do start with D.)

He calls me Bones after – who else – Leonard ‘Bones’ McCoy, who he has a special spot in his heart for. I call him Jim for James Tiberius Kirk. This all started when I mentioned a family tendency towards drinking gin&tonics and mint juleps (but only on Derby Day), and he began yelping about how I was totally Bones. I was a combination of delighted and utterly horrified – one of the many hilarious text messages I recieved on this theme reads:

I MEAN YES I LIKE GIVING YOU NECKRUBS

BUT JESUS CHRIST

YOUR SHOULDERS FEEL LIKE PART OF THE SHIP, BONES

TAKE A DAY OFF

The only recourse I had was to give in and call her Jim.

The nickname works on two levels for me – the obvious jaded-grumpy-charming-doctor level, and the I-collect-bones level. (I have a badger skull, horse teeth, an unidentifiable rodent skull, some mystery leg bones, a unknown vertebrae, a rabbit skin, a fox tail, an Australian possum tail, and some feathers.) (Jim thinks this is weird, but he totally collects them too.)

Jim is genderqueer, and I’m just plain queer. I consider her to be something between girlfriend and boyfriend; I use the former with my parents, and the latter with my friends. I switch pronouns regularly and call her my Gentleman; he calls me his Lady, although admittedly somewhat less often and perhaps without the capital letter. And yes, for those of you wondering, I’m a girl – and for those of you who are nosy, Jim is not a girl. Or a boy. Not precisely. Not right now.

…Jim’s just Jim. And I’m just Bones. Nice to meet you.

Dognose Says

I have this problem with sending peculiar text messages to Jim while I’m at work. In that I do it a lot. I mean, I work alone most of the day, my boss regularly takes phone calls while on walks (as I do; I set up an interview while on a walk once). So it’s not like it’s a bad thing. I just – as mentioned in the previous post – get a little weird when I’ve been on my own all day.

So there are a number of messages in my Sent folder that contain a close-up picture of a dog’s nose and text that begins DOGNOSE SAYS.

(Jim, by the way, is my significant other, and will get an entry of hir own soon.)

The ones that are there now say the following:

DOGNOSE COMMANDS IT (golden retriever)

DOGNOSE SAYS GO TO THE DOCTOR (black lab)

DOGNOSE SAYS I AM RIGHT (maltese)

Dognose says Happy We Are Dorks Day (golden retriever, on Jim and I’s two-month anniversary)

Dognose is nuzzling meee. (greyhound, no picture)

There are a LOT of other dog pictures, including FAT DOG IS FAT, SO VERY FAT and TINY DOG IS TINY and THIN DOG DUG A HOLE.

So… essentially I take pictures of stranger’s dogs’ noses and send them to my partner. I really, really need to get my iPod earbuds fixed so that I have something to distract me.

Where Do Greyhounds Put Their Organs?

My main source of income during the summer is working as a petsitter. I work for a company that shall remain nameless, run by two gay men who did so well at it that they were able to quit their day jobs. They also got a horse, and horses are not cheap, so that suggests to me they have been extremely successful.

It’s generally a pretty good job. I usually have between 3 and 10 visits/walks a day, which can be rough but also means that I 1) get a lot of exercise, and 2) make a lot of money. My pay-per-visit is ten dollars for a regular walk, and 12 dollars for an off-leash run, which means that on a particularly rough day I can make upwards of a hundred bucks. It can severely cramp my social life, given that my day has the potential to  start at 6am and end at 9pm. However, I’m generally off by 6 or 7, which means I can do things at night, and I also have three-to-four hour periods off during the day – and I’ve been known to bring my friends along on walks once in a while.

It’s a weird job, though. It gives me a lot of time alone, and when I’m alone for long periods of time I start to mutter to myself. This should by all rights be good for my writing; one of the ways I used to compose stories and poems was out loud, at the barn — unfortunately I seem to have only one mode of thought during my dog walks. And it’s not poetic.

I call it “Where do greyhounds put their organs?”

It’s not that I only think about greyhounds (although I often do, because I walk four of them a day in two sets of two), but that’s the question I keep returning to. I just cannot figure it out. Where do they put their stomachs? Do they not have intestines? They seem to be all legs and fur and ribs. I mean look at this dog.

Variations on “where do greyhounds…” include things like “What possible reason is there to breed a maltese?” (I take care of five), “Are all Jack Russells missing the part of their brain that says ‘do not bite Grace’?” (two dogs), and “I wonder how many Labs it would take to knock me down?” (uncountable dogs, and the answer is ‘more than two’ but I do not know the exact number, please do not let me find out).

The problem isn’t so much the questions themselves. They are all valid questions (especially the last). It’s that I will ask myself the exact same question every time I see the pertinent dog, and go over the exact same answers, and come to the exact same conclusions, every. single. day. I do this when I’m working out a scene or plot or character or line of poetry, but at least I do it to some end. This is just sheer repetition. I need new questions, because I’ll be working this job for at least another month and a half.

Next time: Dognose says hello.

How I Named It

Fred started to follow, but Nita caught him in cupped hands, holding him back for a moment. Fred! Did we do right? Even here she couldn’t keep the pain out of her question, the fear that she could have somehow have prevented his death. But Fred radiated a serene and wondering joy that took her breath and reassured her and filled her with wonder to match his, all at once.

Go find out, he said.

“So You Want to be a Wizard”, by Diane Duane.