Maow! :9

In the tv series Dead Like Me, several times people say things along the line of: "Can we stop talking about naked people now, I want to be able to eat my breakfast."

Arrrrrgh!

Which is why the old guy who frolicked about in the nude after he died was my hero.

I've got the hots for a robot.


The Fuzzy is chuffed that something has made me take a proper interest in Transformers at last.

It was going so well, and then the poor clueless lad had his Awakening thanks to that damn sorceress who randomly seduces people at parties. And then he came across his friend-who-fancies-him in a male brothel, and suddenly out of nowhere goes "omg, he's actually hot", and then they *both go to a female brothel and have sexing with (separate) ladies instead.*

Please can has boys that *don't* need to try out Option One first?


(Plus, latest books I need from the queer bookshop: Evolution's Rainbow, Sissyphobia, and possibly The Porn Report)

Also, *whyee* does my doctor want me to go to the gym so badly? I do not wish to, as I am lazy, even if the results would please his eye. He says he likes me to be his last appointment of the night since I don't make him have to think (because I haven't got an Illness that needs diagnosing). I now weigh 62kg, which is 6kg more than before. I think it's in my arms and shoulders.

The world has started giving me nice things again:

1) Frenchs Forest school rang up again and said oi, why haven't you paid for the fair this Sunday, and I said coz I never got your email, so they sent it again and now I have work on Sunday.

2) Stencil cutting people cut my stencils today, so I should have them in time for the school fair on Sunday, and don't have to use my crappy hand-cut ones, hooray!

3) Steve of Radical Leather is going to make me a custom leather chest-vest for only $150!


Maybe I will get sorted out and get back into airbrushed tattoos now. Get some proper displays done by the signwriting place up the road, etc.

Bah, I just spent four hours doing *something* with that new website. It doesn't look like four hours' worth of progress. Why do these things take so loooong? Oh, wait, I remember, it's because IE is evil. Couldn't they ban it or something?

I think I might go and live here.

As long as it's not too tiny.

The new car overheated when I was trying to drive it to work, poor thing. Luckily there was a garage at a service station just up the road and they took it in for the day and fixed up the coolant leak that was causing the problem. Now we just have to get the diesel leak that is *wasting our fuel* fixed, and it might be functional again. In the meantime, I borrow my mum's little green car to go to work.

Still have not been attacked by hysterical men yelling "Aiee, there's a *girl* in our toilets!!" despite foolishly shaving off my new beard hairs that grow under my chin. I did this because my coworker told me beards grow back faster and quicker the more you shave them. But the downside when they've hardly even grown is that when you shave them off, they're *gone*! Not that it makes any difference, customers have been confidently calling me "the lady" regardless. Even the mentally challenged guy who lives at the end of the street in Willoughby where my car ran aground this morning thinks I am a girl!!

My nieces are coming to visit next week. I haven't seen them for a bazillion years, and they are now 15 and 12 years old! I hope they still like me.

Blasted landlords say they have to come and live in our house for 6 months to a year while their own house gets renovated.

This means we have to move back to blighted Hornsby and rent the Fuzzy's parents' unit there (which technically belongs to his grandmother) while we wait to get it back.

Pluses: Vastly reduced rent, convenient location for work, trains, we get the bond back...

Minuses: I spent 6 months figuring out how to get out of Hornsby the first time, there's no *sea* there, we won't want to go back to paying a zillion dollars in rent to move back here after however long... And I would rather live in the other house in Toowoon Bay except that it's a stupid impractical place to get to and is 75km/an hour's drive away from Hornsby.

Poot.

I started reading the new translation of the New Testament, which is by an ancient Greek scholar, who actually understands the slang and metaphors, and can render its meaning in modern English as close as possible to the authors' original meanings.

I'm only partway through Matthew, and it started very promisingly, with Jesus saying stuff like don't be greedy and treat others as you would wish to be treated, and refusing to obey the stodgy old traditions. Later on, though, he starts to talk about punishment for bad people in the "next age", and I think he also said that the people who are good will get to judge the bad people. That doesn't gel with his earlier statements, as it encourages people to be greedy for goodness so they can get their revenge later on. The Fuzzy thinks maybe the earlier things he's quoted as saying may have been the real man's actual humanitarian message, whereas the later stuff was tacked on by priests and what-have-yous appropriating him for their religion.

The other problematic thing is that he *knows* what the prophecies of Isaiah say, so he very carefully and deliberately fulfils them. "Nooo, I'm not just tricking you all into thinking I'm the son of God by knowing all the prophecies, I really am him! Yes, really!" Although there's a funny bit that says no-one believes in him in his home town ("Oh, it's just Mary's son giving himself airs...")

Homosexuality and Civilisation said the two deadly bits of the Bible are Leviticus and Romans. Plus the misinterpretation of Why God Destroyed Sodom (which I think is in Genesis). Romans is in the New Testament, so will see what Paul's message really was.

The sad truth though, is we might have an accurate-as-we-can-get-it translation *now*, but for thousands of years they didn't - it was translated slapdashedly into Latin and from there into other languages, and that's the source priests and lawmakers have been using as an excuse to execute, torture and imprison queer people for all this time.

I think the Fuzzy and I got pegged as members of The Brotherhood by another queer man today, as he served us in the RTA. It was rather odd, coz you see stuff about "If you see another transperson, don't be all 'whee, hello there, brother or sister!' or they'll hate you because they're not passing", so I wasn't expecting gay men to go all chatty and friendly for no apparent reason.

Also, I think we might have gotten our first poof joke, because the guy's supervisor, who had to come and do some thing on the computer for him, referred to our satisfactorily completed transaction as "F. A. B.", which as far as I know stands for nothing but "fab". We were like, "huh? what is this F.A.B?" and I was thinking, "why does he think we're the kind of people to whom 'fab' is meaningful? Oh, wait..."

Clearly there is more to this Visibly Gay thing than just dodging the baddies!

But it makes a change from old ladies patronising me with "dear" and "darling" (with the sweet-little-female-child inflection). Honestly, if I ever call a person younger than me "darling" or "sweetie", I want to be shot, before the infection can spread.

EDIT: Oh, PS, I stand corrected - the first guy liked us because we were Gay, the second guy liked us because we were Nerds (he told us the Fuzzy's dad's company should be XL5, not XL2), but was a little miffed when he found out we were Hitchhiker's Guide nerds instead of Thunderbirds ones. Still, he did his best to convert us, with his F.A.B. Those are pretty cool people to find working in the RTA.

Hahaha, the Doctor finally got sick of people fancying him. :D

Poor Fuzzyball got some tummy bug again.

( Brief description, and complaint about my little phobia )

Actually, yesterday managed to be the most super bad-luck day ever!

First, I had the weird Pains Of Doom in the morning.
Then in the evening I went to the Fuzzy's petrol station to get more petrol, and also went to the loo there and... oops, found out there was no loo paper after it was Too Late!
Then I was worried because the Fuzzy was going to the city to meet his friends for the "pub crawl", which of course was a stag night, and I was fussed at the idea of there being sexist parties to which I was Not Invited, *plus* ruddy Wayman had been teasing me at dinner about What Goes On at stag nights, so I was scared he might cheat on me...
*Then* I had my crowning moment when I scraped the Subaru *which has just had its paint job completely repaired* against a pole while trying to reverse it next to a pertrol pump.
And then when I moved it, I had the petrol cap on the wrong side of the car...
Then I went home and did nothing else wrong, except dream that I'd broken the laptop's screen, and that I lived in a big house with lots of queer friends and the psycho fundamentalist neighbours next door were trying to kill us...
Meanwhile, the Fuzzy met his old school friends, and I think they were having an all right time except one friend got tossed out of the strip club for pinching a pile of the fake tipping money. And then the Fuzzy, who was the only one who hadn't drunk any alcohol, got attacked by his Bug. Then he had an interesting trip home on late-night public transport, still feeling crook. He probably should have just stayed at his friend's place.
And he got back to the car and lots of birds had pooed on it.
Then of course, he had to tell me about the Bug when he got home, so I had a Panic and went to sleep downstairs and fuss about whether I would catch it...

Hopefully that was all our bad luck for the year!

"Bignorance"


That is all for now. :)

We found the visitors' entrance to Torchwood on Google Maps!! :D

Someone else did, too, it seems, if you actually search for "torchwood", but their pin is too high, it needs to be about 10m south, in front of that obelisk thing.

Here was me, thinking I'd have to get a Student Loan so I could go to uni. Then I remembered. We have a thing called a credit card! It has a lower interest rate than a loan, a credit limit of $6600, (which they keep trying to increase to $9000) and... we already have it!

Various budgetings reveal that going to uni will reduce my basic annual income of $14,500 to about $10,500, requiring us to live on about $680/week instead of $750.

But! We're not paying for petrol any more and lo, I get a *travel concession* which reduces the cost of a travelten bus ticket to $23 per week. That's more like it.

It's looking like it's fairly safe to stick the uni fees on the credit card and pay them off incrementally if we start to run out of money.

Plus!

Old car came back today. It has been all fixed up and is booful and ready to sell. Almost. It still needs the other pedals taking out of it and the old steering wheel putting back on. And the numberplates exchanging with the new car. But still...
And we paid the Fuzzy's dad for the parts to convert the new car. Dunno if he'll have time to convert it before I need it for holiday plaster, I think I'm starting on Saturday the 12th.

Also, I think it might be time to go in the boys' toilets, as I have fuzz all over my chin and rampant adolescent pimples all over the rest of my gob. When I went to watch the Fuzzy's gymnastics class tonight, and went to the loos, an eight-year-old girl stared rather worriedly at me and I felt guilty.

And my poor ole phone needs repairing, as the letter t has died and the 1 is not much better.

One of the new senators from WA (no, *not* Washington) has an FTM partner, and the local newspaper wrote *two* sensible articles about him!

Lookie! And lookie again!

I think I am becoming a compulsive blogger.

Silly me, expecting that any contribution the Government might make toward a person's tertiary education would be even slightly useful! What was I thinking?

Theoretically, AUStudy nets you the princely sum of $355.40 per fortnight to study full time (good lord, a whole $177 per week).

The course I was thinking of doing costs about $2500 per semester.

Assuming a semester has seven fortnights in it, the AUStudy just about pays for the course. Hooray!

But what about actually running the household?

My current contribution to the finances varies between $200 and $700 per week. The Fuzzy's is a steady average of $500. The rent alone is $400/w. The total cost of house, car, us, etc. is probably between $600 and $700/w. Very little wiggle room there, ladies and gents.

What's that, Centrelink? If you earn more than $236 *a fortnight* your AUStudy payment gets *halved*? And if it's above $316 it goes down to 40%?

So, I can cram in work around full-time study, make enough to pay the bills, and fuss around declaring my income to Centrelink, and the government will give me $70 a week. Which covers commuting to uni, and two days' worth of lunch. Woot!

Once again Centrelink triumphs in the fight to Make The Lazy Bastards Help Themselves.

So, there's a course called Bachelor of Design in Visual Communication offered by UTS (which is probably the most convenient uni to get to from here - catch the bus to Central and walk down the road).

From its content, it looks like the qualification to wave around if you want someone to actually give you a job in print media/web design.

Now how did I get on to this? Well, if I sit down and think rationally, it becomes apparent that the only things I have some real degree of competency in are pushing words around and, to a lesser degree, knocking websites together.

Then I come across interesting-sounding jobs like this one, advertised by ACON, and go "oo, imagine if I could do that!" (read the "information pack" link at the bottom of the page to see all the interesting duties the person who gets this job will have)

I wonder if I can even afford to go back to uni.

They're talkin' politics on free_speech_ftm again.

I blame Queer Theory. Honestly, they make up this whole fanciful world for their heads to live in which has almost nothing to do with real people. And then some poor transperson comes along and the queer theorist throws a fuss because the transperson's existence mucks up their theory.

How are all these artyfarty genderqueers going to effect their cultural revolution when the man on the street could not only *not* relate to their issues, but not even understand the language they say it in? Man On The Street finds it much easier to understand the simple transsexual story of the "man trapped in a female body, taking medical treatment to rectify this".

How are they ever going to achieve anything other than "oh, there is this group of people called genderqueers who are unhappy with the designations of 'man' or 'woman', so if someone tells you they're genderqueer, remember to refer to them as 'ze'?" What else can people who have already picked their gender do?

Maybe they don't want to do anything really except stand in their little universities in America and yell. And publish books. And go to other universities and yell at each other there over how to deconstruct the gender binary.

It's like when I had to try and explain to the Fuzzy about how I had an issue with X or Y aspect of being female because it Meant Stuff. He has never believed in stuff meaning stuff and gets on just fine without it.

Seems people would like the phenomenon of transsexualism to mean something, but it doesn't mean anything! It's a variation of the human condition that pops up often enough that doctors have given it a name and, due to some good work on the medical ethics front, offered us a "treatment" we can take advantage of. If you're female and you need to be a man, here's the path our society offers you.

I suppose it's like religion, really. You want people to know what Christianity entails, you have to preach it. You want people to take up Gender Deconstructivism, you have to let them know it's there. And then, if we're lucky, some Gender Deconstructivists might get elected to parliament and make a nuisance of themselves, preaching on about Queer Values and a Binary Culture, instead of keeping the hospitals and roads in good repair. Nuffin' changes much.