Classes and work and visitors - Oh My!
I was going to write a witty blog post about connection, communication and not using the internet, but I'm having a crazy week, so, to summarize:
It's easy not being on the internet when you are too busy to pee.
antiochlogan@yahoo.com
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Day 16: Let the awkward social interactions BEGIN!
As a rule, I attract…um…people. But not usually the people I was hoping to attract. Everyone has stories like this. Here’s one of mine:
A while back, I was waiting for someone in a bar. We were going to hangout, have a drink and get to know each other. It wasn’t quite a date. It was more of a pseudo-I might want to go on a date with you- pre-screen date. I had gotten there a little early, grabbed a beer and was sitting, watching the ESPN highlights (gay sports bar dates are not necessarily as hot as you’d think) and people watching. This was before I could use my phone to solely absorb all of my attention.
While I was sitting there, a gentleman wondered up – very intoxicated and asked if I have a lighter. I smoked at the time, so I did. He introduced himself. We’ll say his name was Don. Don was rangy and sort of leathery, skinny in that sort of way that veteran smokers can be – like all the moisture in his body had been absorbed by the cigarettes. I introduced myself, we shook hands, and then…he didn’t let go of my hand. I let my hand go limp so that it crumpled into a boney, bendy mass and tugged back to indicate that it was time to let go. Don thought this was awesome – the same way dogs leap onto squeaky toys because they sound like dying animals. He also thought I was cute.
Don used my useless, squished hand to pull himself closer to me. He slurred, “where’s your husband?” And then he cuddled up beside me on the bench. He thought I was really cute. Don had been in the military and lived everywhere, including, he claimed, Chattanooga even though he couldn’t tell me anything about it. He had been single for the last four years after his partner had left him for a Filipino stripper. He thought I was cute though.
When my pseudo-pre-screen-get to know you date showed up, he was shorter than I had hoped, and very amused that by my new cuddle buddy who had draped his arm across my shoulders. He was absolutely no help, so I introduced them. Don took this as a sign that he’d been invited to stay for the duration, and while he told us about his credit problems, I lit a cigarette.
“A’cuse me,” a voice said. I looked up to see that another, very drunk gentleman had wondered over. “C’aa, I borrow y’ lighter, cutie.” Drunker than Don, this guy placed himself in the middle of our awkward threesome and couldn’t stand still long enough for me to light his cigarette. We’ll call him Ron. Ron was from…somewhere. He slurred so bad that it might have been “Iowa”, “Ohio”, “Idaho” or “I don’t remember.” Ron was about Don’s age and similar in build, but paler, taller and more moisturized. Ron did something, which might have been unemployment. Ron had also lived everywhere. So, the first half-hour of my pseudo, pre-screen date was spent being mostly entertained and somewhat inappropriately touched by two possibly vagrant drunkards. Let’s be clear, they wanted nothing to do with my date; he was sort of being pushed out of the circle.
Finally, I asked Ron, “have you met my friend, Don? I think y’all grew up near each other.” Surprised and excited, one with his hand on my thigh, one with his hand on my shoulder, they began to speak a native alcoholic dialect that my date, and I couldn’t understand. I interrupted only once to ask Don and Ron what they’d like to drink. And then I grabbed my date and “went to buy the next round.” Later, we watched Ron and Don stumble out of the bar together, and somewhere, an alcoholic cupid got its wings.
To be fair, I’m southern, raised in a family full of preachers and preacher’s kids. I’ll talk to just about anybody, hear them out on a lot of things. I'll give anyone atleast one chance, but sometimes, my patience is long...sometimes, it's just not.
So, what does all this have to do with quitting the internet?
Well, yesterday, I headed out to the coffee shop for a few minutes to unwind before class. I thought an iced tea and the crossword puzzle would do wonders for my mood after work. This particular coffee shop has a bench with two-top tables in front. Being San Francisco though, the tables are no more than three inches apart, so if you need to get in and out, you either have to move the whole table, or scooch out the side.
I like the aisle seat, so I took the end table fully prepared to move should someone want the vacant table next to me. And a few minutes later, I glance up to see this guy looking at me and then at the blank spot next to me, then at me and back to the blank spot. This should have been a warning sign. It’s one of my pet peeves at work. I think it’s rude and kind of pathetic to go stand in front of someone’s desk until they acknowledge you.
So after a day of people standing in front of my desk like children who need to go to the bathroom, this guy at the coffee shop comes and stands in front of my table because apparently, getting into that empty seat is somewhere close to an algebra problem. But, I’m here to relax, so I stand up, move my crap and get out of the benching area.
“Are you leaving,” he asks, and that’s when I notice that there are numerous other open tables that don’t require this much brain power to get into.
I should have left.
Or moved.
But I just wanted to sit down and drink my tea and read the paper and do the crossword puzzle. So, I pointed to the empty seat and sighed, “Get in.”
Is this the point where I tell you that this guy was sweating…a lot…and not from any physical exertion? Or that he was wearing cologne? Or that despite the cologne, he smelled a little like ham? Or that he had Dungeon Master written all over him?
I will tell you that he sat down. And I sat down. And he slid over towards me immediately until his leg touched mine. “Hi, I’m Todd,” he said. I shook his sweaty meat paw, introduced myself back and slid away, turning my attention back to my paper.
Todd didn’t move. Instead, he looked onto my paper (he had his own spread out on the table), and occasionally, he glanced up at my face with a big, drippy grin. Then my paper, then my face – doing a pee-pee-pay attention to me dance. So I looked at him, in the eye and waited, eyebrows cocked, expectant that Todd would have something to say. He didn’t. Instead, he looked over at his own paper, a neck craning exercise considering how far away it was.
I flipped the page, found an article about unexploded bombs shutting down lobster fishing in a certain part of Maine. I thought that was funny, so I started drawing heavy lines around it with my ink pen until the paper began to give out. Yes, that’s right – I used an ink pen to cut an article out of the paper. Apparently to Todd, I had just performed a magic trick.
“Wow, I’ve never seen anyone do that. You just draw around the article until it comes out of the page?”
Yep Todd, just like that. Here’s your helmet.
Then, he waited. Like I was about to pull a rabbit from my ass….just for him. I scooted to the end of the bench, pulled my table with me and flipped to the puzzle section.
I was thankful when he didn’t follow. I relaxed a little and started poking around the crossword puzzle. I got really excited when I remembered “WKRP in Cincinnati” for one of the clues. I was doing pretty good, sipping my tea, proud that after years of slacking off, I still knew my way around a Wednesday (don’t laugh) crossword. Twenty or so minutes passed.
I checked my clock, decided it was time to leave for class and folded up my paper. Next to me, suddenly, Todd rattled and rustled and looked back at me.
“I beat you!”
His eyes gleamed, and he wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. It dripped onto the paper. I looked down and saw that his crossword puzzle was done.
That you did, Todd…That you did.
antiochlogan@yahoo.com
A while back, I was waiting for someone in a bar. We were going to hangout, have a drink and get to know each other. It wasn’t quite a date. It was more of a pseudo-I might want to go on a date with you- pre-screen date. I had gotten there a little early, grabbed a beer and was sitting, watching the ESPN highlights (gay sports bar dates are not necessarily as hot as you’d think) and people watching. This was before I could use my phone to solely absorb all of my attention.
While I was sitting there, a gentleman wondered up – very intoxicated and asked if I have a lighter. I smoked at the time, so I did. He introduced himself. We’ll say his name was Don. Don was rangy and sort of leathery, skinny in that sort of way that veteran smokers can be – like all the moisture in his body had been absorbed by the cigarettes. I introduced myself, we shook hands, and then…he didn’t let go of my hand. I let my hand go limp so that it crumpled into a boney, bendy mass and tugged back to indicate that it was time to let go. Don thought this was awesome – the same way dogs leap onto squeaky toys because they sound like dying animals. He also thought I was cute.
Don used my useless, squished hand to pull himself closer to me. He slurred, “where’s your husband?” And then he cuddled up beside me on the bench. He thought I was really cute. Don had been in the military and lived everywhere, including, he claimed, Chattanooga even though he couldn’t tell me anything about it. He had been single for the last four years after his partner had left him for a Filipino stripper. He thought I was cute though.
When my pseudo-pre-screen-get to know you date showed up, he was shorter than I had hoped, and very amused that by my new cuddle buddy who had draped his arm across my shoulders. He was absolutely no help, so I introduced them. Don took this as a sign that he’d been invited to stay for the duration, and while he told us about his credit problems, I lit a cigarette.
Finally, I asked Ron, “have you met my friend, Don? I think y’all grew up near each other.” Surprised and excited, one with his hand on my thigh, one with his hand on my shoulder, they began to speak a native alcoholic dialect that my date, and I couldn’t understand. I interrupted only once to ask Don and Ron what they’d like to drink. And then I grabbed my date and “went to buy the next round.” Later, we watched Ron and Don stumble out of the bar together, and somewhere, an alcoholic cupid got its wings.
To be fair, I’m southern, raised in a family full of preachers and preacher’s kids. I’ll talk to just about anybody, hear them out on a lot of things. I'll give anyone atleast one chance, but sometimes, my patience is long...sometimes, it's just not.
So, what does all this have to do with quitting the internet?
Well, yesterday, I headed out to the coffee shop for a few minutes to unwind before class. I thought an iced tea and the crossword puzzle would do wonders for my mood after work. This particular coffee shop has a bench with two-top tables in front. Being San Francisco though, the tables are no more than three inches apart, so if you need to get in and out, you either have to move the whole table, or scooch out the side.
I like the aisle seat, so I took the end table fully prepared to move should someone want the vacant table next to me. And a few minutes later, I glance up to see this guy looking at me and then at the blank spot next to me, then at me and back to the blank spot. This should have been a warning sign. It’s one of my pet peeves at work. I think it’s rude and kind of pathetic to go stand in front of someone’s desk until they acknowledge you.
So after a day of people standing in front of my desk like children who need to go to the bathroom, this guy at the coffee shop comes and stands in front of my table because apparently, getting into that empty seat is somewhere close to an algebra problem. But, I’m here to relax, so I stand up, move my crap and get out of the benching area.
“Are you leaving,” he asks, and that’s when I notice that there are numerous other open tables that don’t require this much brain power to get into.
I should have left.
Or moved.
But I just wanted to sit down and drink my tea and read the paper and do the crossword puzzle. So, I pointed to the empty seat and sighed, “Get in.”
Is this the point where I tell you that this guy was sweating…a lot…and not from any physical exertion? Or that he was wearing cologne? Or that despite the cologne, he smelled a little like ham? Or that he had Dungeon Master written all over him?
I will tell you that he sat down. And I sat down. And he slid over towards me immediately until his leg touched mine. “Hi, I’m Todd,” he said. I shook his sweaty meat paw, introduced myself back and slid away, turning my attention back to my paper.
Todd didn’t move. Instead, he looked onto my paper (he had his own spread out on the table), and occasionally, he glanced up at my face with a big, drippy grin. Then my paper, then my face – doing a pee-pee-pay attention to me dance. So I looked at him, in the eye and waited, eyebrows cocked, expectant that Todd would have something to say. He didn’t. Instead, he looked over at his own paper, a neck craning exercise considering how far away it was.
“Wow, I’ve never seen anyone do that. You just draw around the article until it comes out of the page?”
Yep Todd, just like that. Here’s your helmet.
Then, he waited. Like I was about to pull a rabbit from my ass….just for him. I scooted to the end of the bench, pulled my table with me and flipped to the puzzle section.
I was thankful when he didn’t follow. I relaxed a little and started poking around the crossword puzzle. I got really excited when I remembered “WKRP in Cincinnati” for one of the clues. I was doing pretty good, sipping my tea, proud that after years of slacking off, I still knew my way around a Wednesday (don’t laugh) crossword. Twenty or so minutes passed.
I checked my clock, decided it was time to leave for class and folded up my paper. Next to me, suddenly, Todd rattled and rustled and looked back at me.
“I beat you!”
His eyes gleamed, and he wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. It dripped onto the paper. I looked down and saw that his crossword puzzle was done.
That you did, Todd…That you did.
antiochlogan@yahoo.com
Monday, September 14, 2009
Day 13: This is not Brokeback Mountain. You're not that hot. I can quit you.
So, two weeks ago, after a pretty long and co-dependent relationship – I broke it off with the internet and tried to go it alone.
I assumed that after all the talking and fights, the break-up would cause a pretty serious rift in my life, and I would feel vaguely like I’d lost a half of myself.
I was curious - late at night, would curl into my chilly bed and wonder what the internet was doing without me? Would food taste different without the internet? Would I need a long time to recover or would I find a new relationship pretty quickly? Would we text message sometimes? Would we talk to each other at parties? Could we be friends? Friends w/ benefits?
Almost halfway through, and I have to be a little more realistic. The internet and I are having a lesbian break-up. I was having commitment issues and an identity crisis, so I freaked and ran away with gallant dreams of a better life without the internet. The internet doesn’t really have a personality, so it will welcome me back at my weakest moment, and we can resume our usual dysfunction without changing any of our destructive patterns together. We’ll go back to the internet offering me options – food, entertainment, shopping, and I’ll just use the internet like a doormat – picking what I want to do, buy or eat without caring how the internet feels about it. All that matters to the internet is that we spend a lot…a lot of time together.
So really, the internet and I are in the same room, and I’m just pretending it’s not there.
It’s not that the internet was really that amazing. The internet was kind of average, actually. I’d had better. It was just that…it knew just how to get my attention and keep it. It knew what to say, what to whisper in my ear, just how to touch me to keep me interested, but when the afterglow passed – I was never particularly wow’ed, and I wondered, why do I invest so much time with something that’s just…ehh.
The single life is a little lonely though…and boring. I had other ideas of how this would be, thought I could just pull out my little black book and call up some of my old flings and have a great time catching up. Turns out…they’re all seeing other people, in different towns or married with kids.
The coffee shop was available, so we’ve been hanging out a little bit. It’s a little bookish, but it has been helping me with my homework. The bar called too, but it’s loud, it’s out everynight and always has a hundred people around it. (Also, I think it might have a drinking problem.) The gym, which I was also seeing for a while when I was with the internet has called and called…and called, but lately, I’m a little put off by how demanding it is.
So what’s the answer: Well, I’m not going back for another two weeks atleast…we’ll see what the internet thinks about that! The question ultimately becomes: Do I severe the ties completely, turn my back on all that we have together?
Maybe a longer separation is appropriate – 3 months, a year?
Or did I just need a month to experience what it’s like without the internet, a month to just feel all by myself? To only vaguely explore how the internet affected me without a total cut-off?
Maybe I’m just here for the experience – just to sew some wild oats. If so, after I’m back with the internet – should I examine my other co-dependent relationships and maybe quit those for a while too?
Suggestions? antiochlogan@yahoo.com
I assumed that after all the talking and fights, the break-up would cause a pretty serious rift in my life, and I would feel vaguely like I’d lost a half of myself.
I was curious - late at night, would curl into my chilly bed and wonder what the internet was doing without me? Would food taste different without the internet? Would I need a long time to recover or would I find a new relationship pretty quickly? Would we text message sometimes? Would we talk to each other at parties? Could we be friends? Friends w/ benefits?
Almost halfway through, and I have to be a little more realistic. The internet and I are having a lesbian break-up. I was having commitment issues and an identity crisis, so I freaked and ran away with gallant dreams of a better life without the internet. The internet doesn’t really have a personality, so it will welcome me back at my weakest moment, and we can resume our usual dysfunction without changing any of our destructive patterns together. We’ll go back to the internet offering me options – food, entertainment, shopping, and I’ll just use the internet like a doormat – picking what I want to do, buy or eat without caring how the internet feels about it. All that matters to the internet is that we spend a lot…a lot of time together.
So really, the internet and I are in the same room, and I’m just pretending it’s not there.
It’s not that the internet was really that amazing. The internet was kind of average, actually. I’d had better. It was just that…it knew just how to get my attention and keep it. It knew what to say, what to whisper in my ear, just how to touch me to keep me interested, but when the afterglow passed – I was never particularly wow’ed, and I wondered, why do I invest so much time with something that’s just…ehh.
The single life is a little lonely though…and boring. I had other ideas of how this would be, thought I could just pull out my little black book and call up some of my old flings and have a great time catching up. Turns out…they’re all seeing other people, in different towns or married with kids.
The coffee shop was available, so we’ve been hanging out a little bit. It’s a little bookish, but it has been helping me with my homework. The bar called too, but it’s loud, it’s out everynight and always has a hundred people around it. (Also, I think it might have a drinking problem.) The gym, which I was also seeing for a while when I was with the internet has called and called…and called, but lately, I’m a little put off by how demanding it is.
So what’s the answer: Well, I’m not going back for another two weeks atleast…we’ll see what the internet thinks about that! The question ultimately becomes: Do I severe the ties completely, turn my back on all that we have together?
Maybe a longer separation is appropriate – 3 months, a year?
Or did I just need a month to experience what it’s like without the internet, a month to just feel all by myself? To only vaguely explore how the internet affected me without a total cut-off?
Maybe I’m just here for the experience – just to sew some wild oats. If so, after I’m back with the internet – should I examine my other co-dependent relationships and maybe quit those for a while too?
Suggestions? antiochlogan@yahoo.com
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Day 9: The Internet Made Me Queer
The internet really did make me queer. Sort of.
All those right wing evangelistic preachers that said the internet would your children down the path to sin and homosexuality…they weren’t entirely wrong.
Gather around boys, girls and those who identify as neither or both. It’s story time:
See back in the day…1996, when AOL sent you eight or ten of those free CD-ROM’s in the mail every week, when CompuServe had a bin at the grocery store of free floppys – my mother, having always been a forward thinker, subscribed us to the World Wide Web. This was just after it stopped being a long distance call from LaFayette, GA to Chattanooga, TN. Before that, getting on the internet would have meant long distance charges…remember those? The graphics were grainy, web pages took hours to load and a download could be disastrously ruined if someone were to pick up the phone.
And there I was: fourteen years old, feeling monstrously tall at 5’7”, clumsy, chunky, acned, butch, mulleted….Not a pretty girl. I had passed that cute, “oh, she’s a tomboy” phase at warp speed just in time for the eighth grade. I walked into that school with ‘dyke’ tattooed on my forehead.
I need you to understand a little bit about where I’m from. My hometown is nestled into the armpit of where Tennessee and Alabama meet. We’re the dirty, red clay feet of Appalachia. We make yarn, buses and stoves. The closest movie theater is still a half-hour away, and Wal-Mart didn’t kill half the town until just before I graduated from high school.
Population: approx. 6000
At fourteen, I wouldn’t meet my first out gay person for another year.
And at fourteen, let’s be clear, I didn’t know what the hell I was. I looked down at my awkward teenage girl body and felt bewildered, overwhelmed and really confused. I was too terrified to look people in the eye to figure out whether they were cute or not. I kept my head down, my back slouched and read…a lot…
And I hate to say that all this came about from cable TV and the internet – but in truth, it was late one night, probably two or three in the morning and there was a documentary on the Discovery Channel. I’m pretty sure it was atrociously called, “What Sex am I?” And this is all a little fuzzy, but it went something like this: it followed three transsexual women and one transsexual guy. The guy was a short, bearded dude who had lost his job as a teacher, his girlfriend, had to move to a new town and his family didn’t talk to him anymore. He had found a surgeon to remove his breasts which left his chest looking vaguely like a cutting board.
So, y’know…the obvious thing to do for any fourteen year old girl would be to switch on the computer, dial-up to AOL and find the ONE message board and ONE chat room for trans-folks and read absolutely everything…right then.
Within a month, I felt like I knew every transgender guy that had an email address. I waited for my family to go to bed before I signed on and scoured the message board the any new messages. I hung out in chat rooms reading feverishly.
I searched the web and found the Harry Benjamin Standards of Care – a document that outlined what a person had to go through with doctors and therapists to transition from one sex to another…I memorized it. When I was in a big enough bookstore in Chattanooga, I found the DSM and looked up Gender Dysphoria – I memorized that too.
It was all so basic, just experiences coming through emails and message board posts. No one was doing much with digital photography yet. Everything was low level icons and text. All the information coming through was direct experience – what injecting yourself with hormones every other week would do to you? How much to inject? What blood tests should be run? How to pass as a man, bind your chest, shave, change IDs, birth certificates, whether to tell people you were transitioning or how to hide the fact that you did transition. It all came through in hunks of success or failure from faceless people 500 or 2000 miles away.
But, in contrast, the public library in my hometown had exactly one listing for transsexual; one paragraph in a 1987 abnormal psychology text book next to pedophilia and bestiality. I know…I memorized that paragraph too.
I was sixteen before I met another trans-person in real life.
Also at sixteen, I transferred to a new high school – a public liberal arts school in Chattanooga (the big city) and started living full-time as a boy. I found that high school via the internet. Very sort of Fame-esque.
The people I met on the internet cobbled together lists and resources that they emailed out on request: doctors that were trans-friendly, surgeons, therapists willing to see trans clients, endocrinologists that would monitor your blood. I found a group for transguys that met once a month in Atlanta, and I started going. By the time I was seventeen and just turning eighteen, I could track down websites of people documenting their transitions – writing about the changes they saw on hormones, posting pictures.
I tried my hand at it because at the time, it seemed like the thing to do.
Embarrassing content can be viewed here:
www.angelfire.com/journal/lonerspath
I found a therapist by posting to the internet. I found the other four therapists that I would go through there too. I found an endocrinologist that way. I discussed what I knew from the internet with my endocrinologist so that, while neither of us were really prepared to deal with my particular health care needs, we got the job done – my liver still intact and very healthy.
By eighteen, four years later, the community of fifty or sixty people that I’d known had grown exponentially as the internet became more and more accessible. I found a conference in DC – True Spirit and traded my senior class trip to Disneyland for a ticket to DC where I crashed in a room with ten people, all of whom I had met on the internet.
I went to a workshop where people who had had chest surgery took off their shirts and talked about their experience. I talked to some of the surgeons. They told me they expected to do maybe five or ten of these procedures their entire careers. Instead, they were doing five or ten a month, guys from all over the country – mostly thanks to the internet. I booked my surgery with a guy in San Francisco.
The next year, at the same conference, I took my shirt off to have my own chest photographed for
Transster.com - which I think is now defunct but was a powerhouse of surgery result pictures for years, thanks to a really hot transguy whose name I can’t remember.
Now…now I can’t imagine how many resources are out there. There are youtube.com video journal postings and responses. There are countless resource sites. There are blogs, blogs and more blogs. People are documenting their transitions daily. There are resources for partners, employers, friends and parents. There’s this:
TYFA for families with young, young kids that are identifying as trans. Its kind of overwhelming. When I got on the internet, people constantly dismissed me for my age. None of them were under 25 (atleast for a while). Now the community is dominated by people coming out at younger and younger ages, exploring what transition or gender expression means to them. They have innumerable resources just a Goggle.com search away. It’s beautiful and amazing. And as I turn 27, it makes me feel a little by-gone and old. I got to be subversive and dynamic for such a short period of time.
If you follow the links, you can see a little bit of how much I’ve changed, how much hair I’ve lost. But while I was talking about this project with a friend, it kind of hit me how important the internet has been. There’s no hindsight on this one. I really don’t know how to imagine where I would be with my life or my identity without the internet. Even seeing the documentary I did, I was so far isolated that information on transgender people would have been difficult or impossible to come by. I simply wouldn’t have known who or where to write to or call. I wouldn’t have changed high schools to live full-time, wouldn’t have gone to college in Ohio…and so on and so on until everything that I know unravels. A huge part of my identity was built by the internet, by a disjointed sharing of information. It’s been really fun to quit the internet and go back to doing the crossword in coffee shops and looking up movie times in the paper. But, really…the internet did make me queer.
If the internet made you queer, email me at antiochlogan@yahoo.com
All those right wing evangelistic preachers that said the internet would your children down the path to sin and homosexuality…they weren’t entirely wrong.
Gather around boys, girls and those who identify as neither or both. It’s story time:
See back in the day…1996, when AOL sent you eight or ten of those free CD-ROM’s in the mail every week, when CompuServe had a bin at the grocery store of free floppys – my mother, having always been a forward thinker, subscribed us to the World Wide Web. This was just after it stopped being a long distance call from LaFayette, GA to Chattanooga, TN. Before that, getting on the internet would have meant long distance charges…remember those? The graphics were grainy, web pages took hours to load and a download could be disastrously ruined if someone were to pick up the phone.
And there I was: fourteen years old, feeling monstrously tall at 5’7”, clumsy, chunky, acned, butch, mulleted….Not a pretty girl. I had passed that cute, “oh, she’s a tomboy” phase at warp speed just in time for the eighth grade. I walked into that school with ‘dyke’ tattooed on my forehead.
I need you to understand a little bit about where I’m from. My hometown is nestled into the armpit of where Tennessee and Alabama meet. We’re the dirty, red clay feet of Appalachia. We make yarn, buses and stoves. The closest movie theater is still a half-hour away, and Wal-Mart didn’t kill half the town until just before I graduated from high school.
Population: approx. 6000
At fourteen, I wouldn’t meet my first out gay person for another year.
And at fourteen, let’s be clear, I didn’t know what the hell I was. I looked down at my awkward teenage girl body and felt bewildered, overwhelmed and really confused. I was too terrified to look people in the eye to figure out whether they were cute or not. I kept my head down, my back slouched and read…a lot…
And I hate to say that all this came about from cable TV and the internet – but in truth, it was late one night, probably two or three in the morning and there was a documentary on the Discovery Channel. I’m pretty sure it was atrociously called, “What Sex am I?” And this is all a little fuzzy, but it went something like this: it followed three transsexual women and one transsexual guy. The guy was a short, bearded dude who had lost his job as a teacher, his girlfriend, had to move to a new town and his family didn’t talk to him anymore. He had found a surgeon to remove his breasts which left his chest looking vaguely like a cutting board.
So, y’know…the obvious thing to do for any fourteen year old girl would be to switch on the computer, dial-up to AOL and find the ONE message board and ONE chat room for trans-folks and read absolutely everything…right then.
Within a month, I felt like I knew every transgender guy that had an email address. I waited for my family to go to bed before I signed on and scoured the message board the any new messages. I hung out in chat rooms reading feverishly.
I searched the web and found the Harry Benjamin Standards of Care – a document that outlined what a person had to go through with doctors and therapists to transition from one sex to another…I memorized it. When I was in a big enough bookstore in Chattanooga, I found the DSM and looked up Gender Dysphoria – I memorized that too.
It was all so basic, just experiences coming through emails and message board posts. No one was doing much with digital photography yet. Everything was low level icons and text. All the information coming through was direct experience – what injecting yourself with hormones every other week would do to you? How much to inject? What blood tests should be run? How to pass as a man, bind your chest, shave, change IDs, birth certificates, whether to tell people you were transitioning or how to hide the fact that you did transition. It all came through in hunks of success or failure from faceless people 500 or 2000 miles away.
But, in contrast, the public library in my hometown had exactly one listing for transsexual; one paragraph in a 1987 abnormal psychology text book next to pedophilia and bestiality. I know…I memorized that paragraph too.
I was sixteen before I met another trans-person in real life.
Also at sixteen, I transferred to a new high school – a public liberal arts school in Chattanooga (the big city) and started living full-time as a boy. I found that high school via the internet. Very sort of Fame-esque.
The people I met on the internet cobbled together lists and resources that they emailed out on request: doctors that were trans-friendly, surgeons, therapists willing to see trans clients, endocrinologists that would monitor your blood. I found a group for transguys that met once a month in Atlanta, and I started going. By the time I was seventeen and just turning eighteen, I could track down websites of people documenting their transitions – writing about the changes they saw on hormones, posting pictures.
I tried my hand at it because at the time, it seemed like the thing to do.
Embarrassing content can be viewed here:
www.angelfire.com/journal/lonerspath
I found a therapist by posting to the internet. I found the other four therapists that I would go through there too. I found an endocrinologist that way. I discussed what I knew from the internet with my endocrinologist so that, while neither of us were really prepared to deal with my particular health care needs, we got the job done – my liver still intact and very healthy.
By eighteen, four years later, the community of fifty or sixty people that I’d known had grown exponentially as the internet became more and more accessible. I found a conference in DC – True Spirit and traded my senior class trip to Disneyland for a ticket to DC where I crashed in a room with ten people, all of whom I had met on the internet.
I went to a workshop where people who had had chest surgery took off their shirts and talked about their experience. I talked to some of the surgeons. They told me they expected to do maybe five or ten of these procedures their entire careers. Instead, they were doing five or ten a month, guys from all over the country – mostly thanks to the internet. I booked my surgery with a guy in San Francisco.
The next year, at the same conference, I took my shirt off to have my own chest photographed for
Transster.com - which I think is now defunct but was a powerhouse of surgery result pictures for years, thanks to a really hot transguy whose name I can’t remember.
Now…now I can’t imagine how many resources are out there. There are youtube.com video journal postings and responses. There are countless resource sites. There are blogs, blogs and more blogs. People are documenting their transitions daily. There are resources for partners, employers, friends and parents. There’s this:
TYFA for families with young, young kids that are identifying as trans. Its kind of overwhelming. When I got on the internet, people constantly dismissed me for my age. None of them were under 25 (atleast for a while). Now the community is dominated by people coming out at younger and younger ages, exploring what transition or gender expression means to them. They have innumerable resources just a Goggle.com search away. It’s beautiful and amazing. And as I turn 27, it makes me feel a little by-gone and old. I got to be subversive and dynamic for such a short period of time.
If you follow the links, you can see a little bit of how much I’ve changed, how much hair I’ve lost. But while I was talking about this project with a friend, it kind of hit me how important the internet has been. There’s no hindsight on this one. I really don’t know how to imagine where I would be with my life or my identity without the internet. Even seeing the documentary I did, I was so far isolated that information on transgender people would have been difficult or impossible to come by. I simply wouldn’t have known who or where to write to or call. I wouldn’t have changed high schools to live full-time, wouldn’t have gone to college in Ohio…and so on and so on until everything that I know unravels. A huge part of my identity was built by the internet, by a disjointed sharing of information. It’s been really fun to quit the internet and go back to doing the crossword in coffee shops and looking up movie times in the paper. But, really…the internet did make me queer.
If the internet made you queer, email me at antiochlogan@yahoo.com
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Day 7: I've Been Drinking
In 2003, I dropped out of college for a while. If you know about that particular time period of my life, you will know that that first sentence isn’t entirely true. It’s more complicated than that, but for simplicity’s sake…
I had moved from my very small town in Georgia to a very small town in Ohio for college. And then, a year and a half later, I dropped out and took a one-way train from Cincinnati to Washington, DC.
I had pretty much no money (about $300), no job and no place to live. And I slept in the living room floor of a really great guy I’d met just twice before. He and his roommate gave me a week. And then, with an unending grace, they let me stay a month…possibly because my raggedy ass sleeping bag was so holey that each morning, I woke up in a nest of down feathers. I was constantly vacuuming.
The first week, I spent much of the day in a coffee shop, huddled over a stack of applications to every retail and fast food establishment I could walk to – mostly in the Dupont Cirle area. We were headed to war. We had an international embarrassment for a president. But everyone was hiring – so by week two, I was slinging coffee at the big gay SuxBux.
Then, I thumbed through the gay paper, through the Post or any periodical that had a classified section for a place to live. I called middle-aged vegan lesbians w/ cats, but they wanted a woman and not even the tranny card could sway them. I called boarding houses for international students but was turned down for being an American vagrant. I went to see boarding houses, but turned them down for trying to rent closets with hot plates for exhorbitant prices. I rode the train for an hour and then walked a mile to visit one really nice place. And the guy there offered me a discount if I would model for him. Put a hand on my ass and offered me another discount. I told him I would think about it.
My poor, terrified mother was calling me daily. What the hell was I doing? Where was I going to live? Then her co-worker told her about craigslist. So, she looked for posts, wrote down the contact info, and I called them.
Finally, I moved into a storage room in a basement of a really awesome house. And the people I lived with there were so fantastic…and hot….Dear Brian – you were too fucking hot for words.
So, when I wasn’t at work, when I wasn’t fascinatedly wondering the streets of DC, I was camped out, writing, reading or doing the Post crossword puzzle at the SoHo Café down at 14th and P Street (I think). Everyday…I was there – pushing coins across the counter to buy tea that I would sip very, very slowly.
At the café, I met a radical faery. Then I met a storyteller. I met Raven. I met Lyra. I met a former advisor to Clinton on Native American affairs who did not like that I liked the word ‘queer.’ I met a dancer…a hot, hot dancer, a drag-queen, an addict, an addict in recovery, and the first person I ever knew to be HIV+. I fell in love, sorta, twice – with a leather man and a muscle boy. My partner visited, and I fell in love with him again too.
And then one day, I showed up at the coffee shop and had friends to sit with. People that did the crossword with me, told me stories, tried to teach me to dance. That was when I started to learn how to be a gay man, started to learn how to pass culturally. It was a really amazing time and all of it without the internet…sorta. All I did was work, drink and laugh.
Now, I told you that story to tell you this one – Three years ago, when I moved to San Francisco, I joined the SFGSL, the gay softball league. Novice Division, slow pitch, gay softball. My roommate and I were picked up by the Pirates – a team with pretty much no returning players and a losing record. We showed up to practice and met David – the dancer, Shawn Hong - the programmer, Craig – who didn’t tell anyone his name for the first two practices, Dave – WOOF, BJ, Andy, Dan and on and on and on…
We lost. The whole season. A lot. By a lot. Punctuated by one win that we could never imagine. That felt like winning the World Series ala bottom of the ninth, two outs sort of deal. Mostly though, I need to reiterate this, for two years… mostly, we just lost. But after almost every game, we went down to the bar and congratulated each other with beer over the good plays. Strategized about the bad ones and stood with each other as teammates. We may have lost a lot, but we lost a lot together.
I’ve played softball for three seasons now, the lineup shifting and changing each season so that I’ve fallen out of touch with some people, met new ones and gotten close to those I’ve been on the field with for a long time…people I hope I’m on the field with for a long time.
I’ve heard stories about Studio 54, the ‘Back to the Land’ Movement, having sex at Disneyland, calling 911 while stoned and the priesthood. I have traveled to tournaments with them, danced with them…made out with like…all of them. I have met non-softball people through them that I find absolutely fascinating. I have drank a lot with them.
So, it needs to be put out there that part of the reason that I may have decided to undertake this project…is that softball season is over. And there’s a comraderie in defending yourself from injury against a softball every weekend. It gives you something to look forward to during the week while your co-workers are getting themselves stuck in elevators or asking you how to use the fax machine.
I was lucky though. My first weekend without the internet, my brother newly in the East Bay and my roommates (really more like family) out of town, I was worried I would get bored and lonely. I was worried that I would aimlessly wonder the city in search of human interaction and contact. But no, softball friends and friends of softball friends called. They coaxed me out with beers. Told me stories and cruised boys with me. Let me go home when it was finally too late up to update any blog. I'm so fucking lucky to have these people in my life.
So, while I want to meet new people and hear new stories (maybe less alcohol oriented) with this project, I also hope to strengthen the friendships I already have.
If you wanna throw the ball around: antiochlogan@yahoo.com
I had moved from my very small town in Georgia to a very small town in Ohio for college. And then, a year and a half later, I dropped out and took a one-way train from Cincinnati to Washington, DC.
I had pretty much no money (about $300), no job and no place to live. And I slept in the living room floor of a really great guy I’d met just twice before. He and his roommate gave me a week. And then, with an unending grace, they let me stay a month…possibly because my raggedy ass sleeping bag was so holey that each morning, I woke up in a nest of down feathers. I was constantly vacuuming.
The first week, I spent much of the day in a coffee shop, huddled over a stack of applications to every retail and fast food establishment I could walk to – mostly in the Dupont Cirle area. We were headed to war. We had an international embarrassment for a president. But everyone was hiring – so by week two, I was slinging coffee at the big gay SuxBux.
Then, I thumbed through the gay paper, through the Post or any periodical that had a classified section for a place to live. I called middle-aged vegan lesbians w/ cats, but they wanted a woman and not even the tranny card could sway them. I called boarding houses for international students but was turned down for being an American vagrant. I went to see boarding houses, but turned them down for trying to rent closets with hot plates for exhorbitant prices. I rode the train for an hour and then walked a mile to visit one really nice place. And the guy there offered me a discount if I would model for him. Put a hand on my ass and offered me another discount. I told him I would think about it.
My poor, terrified mother was calling me daily. What the hell was I doing? Where was I going to live? Then her co-worker told her about craigslist. So, she looked for posts, wrote down the contact info, and I called them.
Finally, I moved into a storage room in a basement of a really awesome house. And the people I lived with there were so fantastic…and hot….Dear Brian – you were too fucking hot for words.
So, when I wasn’t at work, when I wasn’t fascinatedly wondering the streets of DC, I was camped out, writing, reading or doing the Post crossword puzzle at the SoHo Café down at 14th and P Street (I think). Everyday…I was there – pushing coins across the counter to buy tea that I would sip very, very slowly.
At the café, I met a radical faery. Then I met a storyteller. I met Raven. I met Lyra. I met a former advisor to Clinton on Native American affairs who did not like that I liked the word ‘queer.’ I met a dancer…a hot, hot dancer, a drag-queen, an addict, an addict in recovery, and the first person I ever knew to be HIV+. I fell in love, sorta, twice – with a leather man and a muscle boy. My partner visited, and I fell in love with him again too.
And then one day, I showed up at the coffee shop and had friends to sit with. People that did the crossword with me, told me stories, tried to teach me to dance. That was when I started to learn how to be a gay man, started to learn how to pass culturally. It was a really amazing time and all of it without the internet…sorta. All I did was work, drink and laugh.
Now, I told you that story to tell you this one – Three years ago, when I moved to San Francisco, I joined the SFGSL, the gay softball league. Novice Division, slow pitch, gay softball. My roommate and I were picked up by the Pirates – a team with pretty much no returning players and a losing record. We showed up to practice and met David – the dancer, Shawn Hong - the programmer, Craig – who didn’t tell anyone his name for the first two practices, Dave – WOOF, BJ, Andy, Dan and on and on and on…
We lost. The whole season. A lot. By a lot. Punctuated by one win that we could never imagine. That felt like winning the World Series ala bottom of the ninth, two outs sort of deal. Mostly though, I need to reiterate this, for two years… mostly, we just lost. But after almost every game, we went down to the bar and congratulated each other with beer over the good plays. Strategized about the bad ones and stood with each other as teammates. We may have lost a lot, but we lost a lot together.
I’ve played softball for three seasons now, the lineup shifting and changing each season so that I’ve fallen out of touch with some people, met new ones and gotten close to those I’ve been on the field with for a long time…people I hope I’m on the field with for a long time.
I’ve heard stories about Studio 54, the ‘Back to the Land’ Movement, having sex at Disneyland, calling 911 while stoned and the priesthood. I have traveled to tournaments with them, danced with them…made out with like…all of them. I have met non-softball people through them that I find absolutely fascinating. I have drank a lot with them.
So, it needs to be put out there that part of the reason that I may have decided to undertake this project…is that softball season is over. And there’s a comraderie in defending yourself from injury against a softball every weekend. It gives you something to look forward to during the week while your co-workers are getting themselves stuck in elevators or asking you how to use the fax machine.
I was lucky though. My first weekend without the internet, my brother newly in the East Bay and my roommates (really more like family) out of town, I was worried I would get bored and lonely. I was worried that I would aimlessly wonder the city in search of human interaction and contact. But no, softball friends and friends of softball friends called. They coaxed me out with beers. Told me stories and cruised boys with me. Let me go home when it was finally too late up to update any blog. I'm so fucking lucky to have these people in my life.
So, while I want to meet new people and hear new stories (maybe less alcohol oriented) with this project, I also hope to strengthen the friendships I already have.
If you wanna throw the ball around: antiochlogan@yahoo.com
Friday, September 4, 2009
Shut your TweetFace
Day 3 – This is a contradiction.
This is intentional hypocrisy.
You can’t really quit the internet if you’re blogging.
And sharing it on TweetFace might make it doubly worse.
So why the blog, if I’m quitting the internet? Well, one reason is that with all this new found free time, I’m getting a little bored. For reals yo! Today, instead of coming home and warming my crotch with a laptop, I cleaned off my shelf in the office – the shelf that was overrun with grad school crap. Everyone has one of these shelves. The place where receipts and pennies go to die. Well, mine had gotten out of hand so much so, that there was a tiny pile of school stuff that had nested at the corner of my bed…for months. It’s all neatly stacked and sorted.
So, blogging is a time suck.
In the modern age too, it’s started operating as a public critique and commentary. Blogging is the ONLY reason anyone ever paid attention to Perez Hilton. It works as forum for discussion sometimes, a new frontier in the freedom of speech. Everyone can have a blog. Unlike newspapers, literary journals or publishing companies – there’s no biased filter. No gate-keeper. Granted, having the internet is still a privileged luxury, the elitist class structures and networks surrounding major media outlets and artistic institutions aren’t necessarily as present in the blogosphere. It’s like a giant open-mic. An open-mic that if you don’t particularly care for, you don’t have to listen to. But everyone who can get on the interwebs can sign up and read their crappy poetry.
And I think really cool shit happens on blogs sometimes. I can't think of any of it right now, and I can't go look for it on the internet. But, people so document important parts of their lives and make them available for public consumption. I don’t think, I know that this creates repositories of resources for people.
Also I’m studying writing. The first rule of which…write everyday. I don’t…or I didn’t. I have for the last couple of days. I have never had the discipline to write everyday. I like to think that I’m letting my words stew and collect, but that’s not how writing works. So partly, blogging and this project are machines to get me to write everyday.
I think that blogs differ from TweetFace because of the nature of writing. Writing is an inherently solitary process. It requires you to sit, be still and process your thoughts into coherent wording. TweetFace is about constant contact – back and forth exchange in a less mature format. Writing is a meditative time I don’t often give to myself. Neither is journaling, but now I’m not tending my FarmLand so…
Plus secretly, I dream that my blog is amazing, and Ira Glass loves it, and I launch my career w/ This American Life because I quit the internet.
Ira, you can email me at antiochlogan@yahoo.com
This is intentional hypocrisy.
You can’t really quit the internet if you’re blogging.
And sharing it on TweetFace might make it doubly worse.
So why the blog, if I’m quitting the internet? Well, one reason is that with all this new found free time, I’m getting a little bored. For reals yo! Today, instead of coming home and warming my crotch with a laptop, I cleaned off my shelf in the office – the shelf that was overrun with grad school crap. Everyone has one of these shelves. The place where receipts and pennies go to die. Well, mine had gotten out of hand so much so, that there was a tiny pile of school stuff that had nested at the corner of my bed…for months. It’s all neatly stacked and sorted.
So, blogging is a time suck.
In the modern age too, it’s started operating as a public critique and commentary. Blogging is the ONLY reason anyone ever paid attention to Perez Hilton. It works as forum for discussion sometimes, a new frontier in the freedom of speech. Everyone can have a blog. Unlike newspapers, literary journals or publishing companies – there’s no biased filter. No gate-keeper. Granted, having the internet is still a privileged luxury, the elitist class structures and networks surrounding major media outlets and artistic institutions aren’t necessarily as present in the blogosphere. It’s like a giant open-mic. An open-mic that if you don’t particularly care for, you don’t have to listen to. But everyone who can get on the interwebs can sign up and read their crappy poetry.
And I think really cool shit happens on blogs sometimes. I can't think of any of it right now, and I can't go look for it on the internet. But, people so document important parts of their lives and make them available for public consumption. I don’t think, I know that this creates repositories of resources for people.
Also I’m studying writing. The first rule of which…write everyday. I don’t…or I didn’t. I have for the last couple of days. I have never had the discipline to write everyday. I like to think that I’m letting my words stew and collect, but that’s not how writing works. So partly, blogging and this project are machines to get me to write everyday.
I think that blogs differ from TweetFace because of the nature of writing. Writing is an inherently solitary process. It requires you to sit, be still and process your thoughts into coherent wording. TweetFace is about constant contact – back and forth exchange in a less mature format. Writing is a meditative time I don’t often give to myself. Neither is journaling, but now I’m not tending my FarmLand so…
Plus secretly, I dream that my blog is amazing, and Ira Glass loves it, and I launch my career w/ This American Life because I quit the internet.
Ira, you can email me at antiochlogan@yahoo.com
Thursday, September 3, 2009
Not Sure Hank Done it This Way
Day 2.
Today, I cheated. And I feel absolutely horrible about it. Two days in, and I couldn’t help myself. I had to open up my browser.
I hate all the music on my iPod right now. No, I actually love it all, and when I’m cruising around town on the Vino, I sing loud and off-key to Waylon Jennings, Postal Service, Bright Eyes, George Straight, Metal Heart, Kanye West….and on and on and on.
But I would have never found Metal Heart or Bright Eyes were it not for Pandora – an internet based streaming music site. I type in something I like and then, if something wonderful and new catches my ear, I write it down and download it later. I’m trying to fight off stagnancy, and it’s a lot of work. In high school, my music collection consisted mostly of Counting Crows and Garth Brooks. When it came to music, I had a seizure helmet and a drool cup. Mostly, I credit my Meg for bringing me out, for demanding that I listen to Weezer, Karate, the 80’s Mix and the Middle School Dance Mix. Then I got an iPod and learned to download music.
Now, at work, I cruise stations like LaunchCast and live365 to keep up with new, mainstream stuff, click around alternative and indie rock stations to hear something new.
All of these stations have something in common though: none of them are necessarily local. The advertisements (if there are any) are generalized and nationally played.
One of the things that secretly makes me happy about living in such a liberal city is that we have a gay radio station. I don’t listen to it…because I don’t own a radio, but on those rare moments that I find myself in a car, I’m tickled to death when someone tunes into Greg and Fernando, and the space fills with the blunt caress of remixed divas.
I got to thinking about this the other day while I ate outside, across the street from the weekly farmer’s market. I’m so lucky to live in one of the neighborhoods where, once a week, local independent shops and eateries set up tents and peddle organic, local grown, independent food. Neighborhood people wander in, and everytime I’m there, I run into people I know and say ‘hi’ for the first time to people I’ve seen around but never really met. It reminds me of going to the Piggly Wiggly when I was a kid. It seemed like we knew everyone there.
I like that, and I began to wonder, why don’t I do that w/ my music? What will it be like to move my listening habits away from anonymous bulk stations to the local gay station, the local country station, local public radio, etc. What richness of San Francisco am I missing by not listening to the radio?
And this brings me back to the cheating. I don’t have a radio, and today, I needed music. New music. Like hipsters need PBR!
So, I logged on, found a provider that would pipe in FM95.7 The Wolf! San Francisco’s only country station. Then I streamed it via the internet all day. I practically marinated in songs about pick-up trucks.
I’m torn. I feel my cheatin’, pathetic self unable to put up with my over-listened to music collection for one day. But at the same time, I signed on to find a local station, one that defied my usual internet listening ways. It wasn’t anonymous. They advertised for local things, concerts and car lots w/ catchy, locally written jingles. I wonder, did I violate the spirit of the project by trying to subscribe to one of the seemingly basic principles of the project?
In other news, the house is clean. One project on my months overdue ‘to-do’ list is done. I have journal-ed, cooked, printed off my homework for next week, read the newspaper, and will shortly, join real live people for real live beer. I’ve also added ‘buy radio’ to my shopping list for the weekend.
antiochlogan@yahoo.com
Today, I cheated. And I feel absolutely horrible about it. Two days in, and I couldn’t help myself. I had to open up my browser.
I hate all the music on my iPod right now. No, I actually love it all, and when I’m cruising around town on the Vino, I sing loud and off-key to Waylon Jennings, Postal Service, Bright Eyes, George Straight, Metal Heart, Kanye West….and on and on and on.
But I would have never found Metal Heart or Bright Eyes were it not for Pandora – an internet based streaming music site. I type in something I like and then, if something wonderful and new catches my ear, I write it down and download it later. I’m trying to fight off stagnancy, and it’s a lot of work. In high school, my music collection consisted mostly of Counting Crows and Garth Brooks. When it came to music, I had a seizure helmet and a drool cup. Mostly, I credit my Meg for bringing me out, for demanding that I listen to Weezer, Karate, the 80’s Mix and the Middle School Dance Mix. Then I got an iPod and learned to download music.
Now, at work, I cruise stations like LaunchCast and live365 to keep up with new, mainstream stuff, click around alternative and indie rock stations to hear something new.
All of these stations have something in common though: none of them are necessarily local. The advertisements (if there are any) are generalized and nationally played.
One of the things that secretly makes me happy about living in such a liberal city is that we have a gay radio station. I don’t listen to it…because I don’t own a radio, but on those rare moments that I find myself in a car, I’m tickled to death when someone tunes into Greg and Fernando, and the space fills with the blunt caress of remixed divas.
I got to thinking about this the other day while I ate outside, across the street from the weekly farmer’s market. I’m so lucky to live in one of the neighborhoods where, once a week, local independent shops and eateries set up tents and peddle organic, local grown, independent food. Neighborhood people wander in, and everytime I’m there, I run into people I know and say ‘hi’ for the first time to people I’ve seen around but never really met. It reminds me of going to the Piggly Wiggly when I was a kid. It seemed like we knew everyone there.
I like that, and I began to wonder, why don’t I do that w/ my music? What will it be like to move my listening habits away from anonymous bulk stations to the local gay station, the local country station, local public radio, etc. What richness of San Francisco am I missing by not listening to the radio?
And this brings me back to the cheating. I don’t have a radio, and today, I needed music. New music. Like hipsters need PBR!
So, I logged on, found a provider that would pipe in FM95.7 The Wolf! San Francisco’s only country station. Then I streamed it via the internet all day. I practically marinated in songs about pick-up trucks.
I’m torn. I feel my cheatin’, pathetic self unable to put up with my over-listened to music collection for one day. But at the same time, I signed on to find a local station, one that defied my usual internet listening ways. It wasn’t anonymous. They advertised for local things, concerts and car lots w/ catchy, locally written jingles. I wonder, did I violate the spirit of the project by trying to subscribe to one of the seemingly basic principles of the project?
In other news, the house is clean. One project on my months overdue ‘to-do’ list is done. I have journal-ed, cooked, printed off my homework for next week, read the newspaper, and will shortly, join real live people for real live beer. I’ve also added ‘buy radio’ to my shopping list for the weekend.
antiochlogan@yahoo.com
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