Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

[This is crossposted, so I guess half the followup discussion will appear under the copy in my personal journal (dglenn) and half will show up under the copy posted to genderqueer.]

It just hit me, reading a few other folks' stray comments about gender, transition, etc., and contemplating my own uncertainty about my own identity, that intergendered/bi-gendered/gender-outlaw is probably one of those identities that can be a permanent gender identity or merely a temporary stopping-place on the way to further self-discovery. (And that dying of old age is probably the most certain way of knowing it wasn't temporary.)

This is one of those

#blink#
   Oh!
     Hmmm....
       Nah.
         But...
           Huh?
             #blink# #blink#
                [scratch head]

types of thoughts, not a really reasoned-out hypothesis.

I'm interested in other people's gut reactions (especially from transgendered folks) as well as after-thinking-a-moment reactions.

(And I fully retain the right to change my mind after I've thought about it more.)

In the "Uh....." category: the Two Towers Protest. (Note that it refers to a petition at PetitionOnline, and that the maintainers of PetitionOnline felt the need to add a comment pointing out that the title of the movie came from 1954 and that the two towers don't much resemble the WTC ... if the title had been The Twin Towers there'd be more of a point.) So, is this serious, a too-subtle-for-its-own-good parody, or a psychology/sociology experiment?

Christianity Today says "Don't Let Your Kids Watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer (But you can tape it and watch after they go to bed)", an article that makes several points in common with the Theologian of the Year article in The Door that I mentioned in a previous post.

Because it was mentioned recently by sometimes_nate, I re-took the Gender Test on theSpark.com. It told me I am "definitely a woman" with 86% confidence. ISTR getting a very similar answer the last time I took it, though it could take me a while to dig through the last several years of archived email to check. This led to my noticing a mismatch between how I talk about my gender identity and how I feel about it (described in the comments to Nate's post).

I'm wondering whether it's possible to archive all the comments I've made on LiveJournal, and posts I've made to shared journals, as well as all the posts to my own journal. I'm kind of partial to the idea of being able to keep my own archive of the things I've written for others to see.

I never made it to the doctor on Friday (nor to the December birthdays party I'd planned to attend) because of a headache bad enough that I didn't want to be on the highway. When I called my HMO's appointment line to explain and reschedule, the appointment nurse decided I needed to talk to a triage nurse, and the triage nurse (after putting me on hold to talk to a doctor) started sounding really concerned and asked wether there was anyone who could drive me to the Urgent Care center. I figured that Urgent Care wouldn't do much more than treat immediate symptoms (and I already have drugs that help, though they're probably not the optimal ones for this) and tell me to schedule a follow-up appointment with my primary doctor ... and two of those $15 appointment copayments add up to a lot fewer packages of Ramen noodles, y'know? So after I promised to get a ride to Urgent Care if I got worse or failed to get better, they gave me an appointment for, uh, about ten hours from now (gee, I should go back to bed).

I've been meaning to get the headaches looked at for a while -- they correlate very strongly with descriptions I've gotten of migraines, and I figured that's what they are, which means there are drugs that can help a lot (assuming those drugs aren't on my body's rather long "do something strange with that drug" list). But the triage nurse was starting to really spook me. Well, I'll finally be doing something about them, anyhow. (That's overdue. They've been getting more frequent.)

I cannot afford my drugs.

I had a productive office visit with a Physician's Assistant at my HMO. We discussed my acid reflux and my headaches. She wrote me a new prescription for Protonix at a higher dose than I'd been taking, and one for a headache med. Because of recent changes to my coverage (in October, when Kaiser raised my monthly premium, they simultaneously rewrote the prescription benefit), my out of pocket cost for a three month supply of Protonix is now five fucking hundred percent of what it was a few months ago.

I don't have $75 in my bank account. I've got, I think, one tablet of the stuff left. I've got other prescriptions I'm running out of. I'm going to be chewing a Hell of a lot of Tums this week.

I'm going to crawl into bed and cry now. And then I'm going to go back to the page of competing health plans I bookmarked and try to figure out whether I can afford any of them.

Interrobang asked whether my recent liking snow post was a reaction/response to her two snow entries. It wasn't. But this entry is.

( On clearing sidewalks )

I don't expect everyone to do the tidy job that I do when my body will let me -- I clear from the curb to the distance of my bottom step, all the way from one side of my house to the other, all the way to bare concrete. (The kids did the same thing, though they weren't as good at getting all the footprint sized patches of ice up. And I managed to do this every time it's snowed since I moved to Baltimore so far.) But if I can't do that next time, I'll at least clear one or two shovel-widths down to bare concrete and make sure that melt doesn't re-freeze across that path, and I don't think that's really too much to ask of any of my healthy neighbours. Now there are an awful lot of vacant houses on my block, so yeah, there'll be patches of un-cleared sidewalk unless somebody feels like doing some extra, but I think we ought to at least have easily walkable sections wherever there are contiguous groups of occupied homes!

And a person with chronic muscle pain and a bunch of children under four feet tall shouldn't be the only ones making a halfway reasonable effort!