Paper Boat Dreams

My friend Michael, now Michelle, sent me questions she wanted to ask all her friends. Never thought of them myself, but now I hope someone could show an answer. This issue just popped up yesterday. Pretty excellent.

Don’t you think it’s kinda weird that if you want to have a surgeon break your nose, suck out fat from your hips, stretch your face tight over your skull, or add dangerous globs of saline to your breast, you just have to sign up, pay the bills and do it..

But if you want to change your genitalia, you must first live as the opposite sex *before* the change, go to therapy, and play the nice girl before you ever get the permission?

I found this whole surgery thing amusing. Michelle had been living as a girl before she started taking anti-androgen pills and she doesn’t looked kind of in between since. It seems this is like going out in drag against her will. A subaltern drag. For how many more months or years she has to do this, only the process knows. But does she really have to make up an entire childhood as a little girl, so when talked with people, they wouldn’t suspect she was once a guy? I have no idea what other stuff she must practice everyday.

She further said that being in a therapy for being a transsexual is the only therapy where they encourage you to lie. Isn’t ironic?

Sometimes you advance towards a specific destination with not just a sense of purpose and direction, but with a sense of what to expect, and you progress assured in the knowledge that the world you know will be as you know it and have always known it.

When I visited my former boarding house the other week, I knew what I would find there. I did not know of course that there were new boarders there or that the owner had been sick for months, or for how I long I don’t know, but I knew where my dusty shoes would be and that my books would be on the shelves; I knew how the paintings of my old room would be hanging, that the half-consumed gin and empty cigarette packs would be under my bed, and so on. I knew my roommate might be there, and if he wasn’t I knew he would be on another day.

Sometimes I realize that I exist with the sense that life goes on in a regular manner, that I can breathe because I am meant to and air is air, that ‘hello, goodbye, long time no see’ will greet me, that fruit and vegetables will be sold where they were sold yesterday– in short, that I can recognize myself in a recognizable world. And that much of life is ordinary and I am compelled by fate to know it, to live it, for however long.

1.  You are in a relationship.
2.  You tell people you are single and your current partner is your ex.
3.  You use a history of things to justify my mistakes (this so scientific to understand my values).
4.  You are a friend of my friend who turn your fucking back to my face and then wall me out of every conversation.
5.  You like to build friendship out of common contempt for a third person.
6.  You ask me to be one of your Facebook fans.
7.  You are only nice to me after I become mean to you; but I am not only mean to you because you were horrible to me when I was being friendly.
8.  You regularly send group text messages.
9.  You prefer salty food over other things served on the table.
10. You have more answers than questions.
11. You say, “I have to get overwhelming compliments”; but don’t work for what you need.
12. You invite me to a dinner without bringing anything to pay the order.
13. You fuck without using a condom.
14. You fuck before the third date.
15. You and I met online.