: Name changes :

It's been rather busy this past couple of days, changing all my identity documents and such. On Monday I got my driver license and social security cards changed, and changed my academic records at my university. I also ordered new copies of my diplomas with my new name so I can replace the old diplomas in their frames, which were in my office at the time of the fire. I also changed my bank account name and ordered new checks and ATM card.

I also changed my credit cards, my cell phone account, my IRA account, my Costco membership and a few other things. I'm sure there will be other things that come up as I run into them, but I'm pretty much done with the major stuff right now. The last thing to do is to submit my tax return for 2005 next week. This is gonna be interesting because I'm filing jointly with my ex-partner, but my name is already changed in the social security records, so it appears from our tax return as if we are a lesbian married couple. I just hope all the convolutions don't trigger an IRS audit.

I've also been doing a fair amount of shopping lately. Now that it's getting warmer, I realize that I don't own any athletic shorts, or much in the way of athletic clothes period. So I bought some pieces just so I can go and walk the stairs in my apartment complex, which is my regular exercise routine. I need to be a little more disciplined about it - I'm about 10 pounds heavier right now than I should be.

I'm also trying out a new face powder by Yves Saint Laurent I found at Nordstroms. It's called Poudre Sur Mesure or semi-loose powder natural radiance. It's a pressed powder in a compact, but with a turn of a ring, the holes in a metal tray on the powder act like a cheese grater and turn the pressed powder into loose powder, which you can apply with a brush. I've been using it a couple of days and I'm pretty happy with it. It gives good coverage and a luminescent finish, and the powder surface won't pick up oils from my skin like ordinary pressed powder would from a brush. Heh, I'm such a girl when it comes to makeup now - hard to believe I've only been using it less than a year.

: Girls weekend :

This past weekend I had a girls weekend with two of my closest friends, Colleen and Mandy, in Columbus, Ohio. Colleen lives in Indianapolis, so I flew there from Houston, where she picked me up at the airport and we drove about three hours to pick up Mandy from a small town in Ohio and drove to Columbus. We checked into a hotel and went out to dinner and walked around the mall on Friday night. I bought Mandy a bra at Victoria's Secret since her old one was so worn out and she can't afford a nice one.

Early Saturday morning, when Colleen and I were just falling asleep, Mandy's friend Tabitha joined us at the hotel. She had driven all the way from Nashville in the pouring rain at night to come hang out with us. She's just starting her transition, two months on HRT, and still looks very much like a boy. Her voice is already pretty good though, and she's going to pass well someday once the hormones take effect.

Saturday afternoon we went out to COSI Columbus, the Center for Science and Industry, and strolled around the campus. Then we visited the pagan store near downtown, where I bought some prayer incense, before stopping at a White Castle for me and Colleen. She had never had a White Castle burger, and I don't think she'll ever have another one - me however, I love onions so I crave them from time to time. Then we went back to the mall we visited Friday night and explored the outdoor part that we had skipped the day before due to rain. I bought some jewelry at Chico's and Tabitha bought some face cream at Bath & Body Works. She has lost a ton of weight, just the way I did pre-transition back in 2004, and she's trying to keep her skin hydrated to minimize stretch marks.

We stopped at a Chipotle for Mandy and Tabitha to get burritos, and a couple of lesbians sneaked a picture of Mandy with a camera phone while they were waiting in line. Mandy was wearing a shirt that said, "My girlfriend likes YURI [Japanese anime porn]" so I guess it had the intended attention-grabbing effect. Mandy has just recently come to the conclusion that she is a lesbian, so she wants attention, just not stalker-ish, creepy kind of attention.

Later that evening, we saw a bunch more lesbians at a gay bar, where we had dinner. Afterwards, we explored some of the BDSM (bondage, dominatrix, submissive, masochistic) stores nearby, getting quite a laugh about all the trans-porn on the shelves. Sometimes it's funny being thought of as a sex object. That was about all we could handle for Saturday night, and Sunday I had to leave the girls early to catch my plane back home. I had a great time with my friends and meeting Tabitha, and I hope we'll be able to do it again after I've settled into my new life in New Jersey.

: Houston Press article :

I just finished reading a very interesting article on the genderqueer phenomenon in the Houston Press ("Bois and grrls" - March 16, 2006) which I'd describe as young transgender expression. It brought up some interesting points about the transgender condition and further shows how out of the closet we are becoming.

In the article, TG author Kate Bornstein talks about how she went through SRS to become female, but for her, it almost drove her to suicide. She did not want to conform to society's roles available to females - she wasn't a straight woman, and lesbians shunned her when they found she was trans. She makes an interesting point that GID is the only medical condition where the suggested therapy (then, as sometimes now) is to lie or hide the truth. We're told to transition and get on with "normal" life in our chosen gender. But the fact is that we will always be TG, and hiding it only perpetuates this mode of treatment. Only by being open and honest will we ever hope to change society enough to where TG people, pre- and post-transition, can live a completely open, honest life without persecution.

: A visit to Mystic :

Here are some pictures of our visit to Mystic, Connecticut last week. We visited the aquarium and the Mystic Seaport area, where sailing ships have been built and launched for hundreds of years. The spot has become kind of a ren-fest with a nautical theme.

At the historic seaport, we stopped at the Shipsmith Shop and watched a ship smith at the forge making iron implements. This shop was built in 1885 in Massachusetts and is the only manufactory of ironwork for the whaling industry known to have survived from the 19th century.



The main attraction at the seaport is the wooden whaleship Charles W. Morgan, built in 1841. It was amazing going down into the hold and seeing how the crew lived and worked in such cramped conditions built for people much smaller than we were.



On the deck of the Morgan, some of the seaport tour guides conducted an impromptu jam session with a banjo and an accordion, while others demonstrated intricate rope braiding techniques.



We also saw a replica of the famous ship Amistad (called Freedom Schooner Amistad, launched in 2000), which was featured in a movie of the same name by Steven Spielberg a few years back. The original Spanish slave ship was the site of a pre-Civil War slave rebellion on the high seas, and the rebels were tried in an American court and eventually allowed to return home to Africa.



While we had lots of fun, we did not get to visit the famous Mystic Pizza parlor, the scene of another movie starring Julia Roberts in 1988. Maybe next time.

: Update from New Jersey :

So if you've been following my life so far, you're probably wondering how the move from Houston to New Jersey went off. It was quite an arduous trip, in many ways more than I'm going to talk about here, but now that I'm here, it feels great to be having a fresh start (even if I did bring a ton of stuff with me).

I've been moving pretty much non-stop since last Friday. I got up at about 7 a.m. to get ready for my movers and tree people to wrap up my ficus tree. Then I got a call from the moving company - the credit card I'd given them had been declined because my credit card company was slow to post the payment I'd made on Thursday, so I needed to either provide another card number - by fax, and I don't have a fax machine - or pay with a cashier's check upon delivery. Since I didn't have a fax machine, I told them I'd give them a cashier's check when my stuff got unloaded. But then I thought better of it and decided I should charge it, in case my checks didn't clear the bank before then (more on that in a second). So I drove down to my leasing office to use the fax machine, but they were still closed, despite being 30 minutes after the posted opening time. I waited outside the gate for a while, then decided to try and go to my bank down the street and use their fax. I was turning around on the street when I saw them open the gate, so I went back in and had them fax the credit card info. This day was starting off with a bang.

Then the tree guys show up and take my tree out of the pot and wrap it in burlap for the trip. After they're done, the movers show up, but they can't get the trailer truck into my apartment - I have to call to have someone open up both gates. After getting a wrong number and finally reaching them, they say that they would prefer the truck stay on the street so as not to block tenant parking or the fire zone. But the mover says that he can be ticketed for being on the street, so they finally let them in, on the condition that someone stay with the truck so it can be moved if necessary. It only took them about two hours to pack and load everything, then I drove to the office of my ex's attorney to pick up my portion of the divorce settlement, a large lump sum of money that is going to pay for my SRS and has to sustain me until I find a job. I deposited the checks in my bank and came back to the apartment to finish my packing and clean the apartment.

After locking up and dropping off the keys and remotes to the leasing office, I ran a few more minor errands - including another run-in at the U.S. Post Office - and left Houston at about 3:30 p.m. on Friday. I drove I-10 through Louisiana, leaving a growing storm coming off the Gulf of Mexico behind me. In the Bayou State, I accidentally took a wrong turn, going south to New Orleans instead of staying eastbound, which took me about 70 miles out of the way. I kept driving on I-59 northeast until about 1 a.m. and stopped in Meridian, Mississippi for the night.

The next morning, I got up about 9:30 a.m., had breakfast, and continued my trip through Alabama. Unfortunately, about 17 miles east of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, one of my tires went flat. I was driving along when another driving pulled up alongside me and started honking furiously. I looked over at him and he pointed down to my car. I immediately pulled over and got out in time to hear the last of the nitrogen escaping from my front passenger's side tire. I called my roadside assistance that comes with my 21st Century auto insurance and waited for the tow truck. I couldn't get to my spare tire because my van had been packed in so tightly that it would have taken hours to get enough stuff out to get to the spare. Fortunately, my insurance covered the cost of the tow back to Tuscaloosa, and the problem was simply a bad valve stem, which only cost $5 to fix. All things considered, things could have been a lot worse.

Since I lost a couple of hours with that incident, I started taking more times between breaks and made good time all the way to Knoxville, Tennessee. Unforturnately, that's where I made another wrong turn and went 35 miles up into the Appalachian Mountains in heavy rain at night before I turned around to get back to I-40. It was then that I noticed that my car was having some serious vibrations when I accelerated between 60 and 70 mph. I figured that the engine mount that my mechanic had been telling me about for a while was finally ready to give out. The result was that I could only cruise at about 45-50 mph and have everyone pass me, or use a downhill to get up to 80 mph and risk getting a speeding ticket. Then, to compound matters, when I entered Virginia, I noticed the sign that says, "Radar detectors are illegal in Virginia," which gave me further to choose the first of my two options. I finally stopped in Wyethville, VA for the night.

I first tried the Hampton Inn, but they were full for the night. So I went across the street to the Ramada Inn, and asked the front desk woman if there were any rooms - there were. She asked if I was a AAA member, or an AARP member (do I look that old?!) or a teacher, or a government employee? I said no to everything, and she said, "I'm just trying to save you money!" Then she saw the earth goddess pendant that I always wear and she gave me 10 percent off for being pagan :) She explained that the bartender at the restaurant is Wiccan, and she was a Buddhist-something or other. "All I know is that God isn't a man - men aren't that creative" she said with a smile. She was nice enough to give me a relatively spacious handicap-accessible room on the ground floor. This is just the sort of thing that would never happen in Texas - it seems that the further north you get, the more open-minded people get, although there are plenty of small-minded people everywhere.

On Sunday morning I woke up at 7 a.m. for my final leg, since I knew it was going to be slow due to the car situation. I slowly made my way along I-81, sometimes driving for four hours straight at a time, passing through Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania (I called my FTM friend Chris and left a message as I passed Hershey, PA to let him know I was nearby) before arriving at my destination in New Jersey at 6:30 p.m. We went out to dinner to celebrate my arrival, and unloaded my van into my new living quarters. My moving truck arrives this weekend with the rest of my stuff.

On Monday, I ran my errands, picking up my post box keys, submitting my change of address, getting my storage area squared away, visiting a compounding pharmacy to fill my HRT prescriptions, and looking for a car mechanic. I unpacked and set up my computer station and my DVD player. Yesterday I took the car into a Honda dealer to get my 100,000 mile tune-up and get that vibration checked out. Unfortunately, all the work I need on the van comes out to a $2,300 repair bill, and that's not including replacement of two bent wheel rims and worn tires I need to address soon. But despite all the ordeals of moving, I'm so happy to be here finally, after months of waiting and planning. I'm looking forward to a wonderful new life here, being with the people who I love and who love me more than anyone else in the world.

: Comics and commuting :

Lots more stuff been happening here, but I wanted to say one thing on my mind as I've just finished showering and putting lotion on - it's really fun making soap bubbles between my boobs in the shower :)

Another thought as I'm sorta following the Barry Bonds home run chase - I think they should change the rules in baseball to say that any walk issued, intentional or not, on a 4-0 count should be worth two bases instead of one. So if a pitcher walks a batter without throwing a single strike, he puts him on second instead of first. Just a thought.

Saturday I drove into New York for the first time to Midtown Comics for Free Comic Book Day. We were lucky to encounter little traffic and got a great parking space just a few feet from where the line ended. We stood in line for about 15-20 minutes until we were able to get in and get our bags of free comics. We browsed around for a bit and I found a couple things I'd like to go back for next week or the next time I'm in the city around Times Square.



After we got back from the city, I helped take a car stereo out of an old car and did some creative home improvement with a piece of insulation board, a utility knife and some clear duct tape. On Sunday, my delivery truck arrived at my storage facility and I helped unload my furniture and my remaining household items. When my 36 inch TV came off, it was put on a narrow cart and I noticed that it was sitting on its own plug with the power cable dragging on the ground. The mover tilted it slightly enough for me to pull the plug free, but the TV was off-balance because it's so front-heavy, and it fell off the cart and right on its glass face, imploding the huge CRT with a percussive BOOM! We all just stood there for several seconds with our mouths open in shock before I inquired if there were some forms I should fill out for this kind of situation. We ended up settling the claim on the spot for $400 in cash, so that the mover could avoid a negative work report and I wouldn't have to deal with red tape in getting a replacement TV or a paid claim.

In truth, this is a pretty good outcome for me. I've been wanting to upgrade my TV for some time, but obviously it hasn't been a priority with everything else that's been going on, plus I couldn't justify spending my limited funds on a new TV when I had a perfectly acceptable TV already. Now that it's gone, I can not only buy a lighter, slimmer, better TV, I can also get rid of the big entertainment center that was donated to me and get something I'd pick for myself. But first I need a permanent place to live, of course.

Monday I had my third job interview with a non-profit firm that I've been courting. I rode the train into New York by myself for the first time and managed not to get lost. The interview went well, and I think I'll be hearing from them soon (but I've said the same thing several times in the past, so we'll see). For the return trip, my potential future boss gave me a ticket to take a ferry that docks at South Harbor just a few steps from the office to Hoboken. The 10 minute ferry ride took me around the tip of Manhattan with the city skyline on the starboard side and a great view of the Statue of Liberty on the port side. At Hoboken, I just missed the train back home, so I bought a sandwich and chips at the deli and ate it in the waiting room until the next train arrived an hour later. Once I get this transit thing down, I'll navigate these connections much better.

Wednesday we had our Lord of the Rings DVD marathon, starting at 11 a.m. and ending at 2 a.m. It was a little too long for some of us, but I had fun anyway. It was nice to chill out for the whole day with my loved ones in front of the TV.

: Little differences :

Saturday I got new tires for my minivan and replaced two of the wheel rims. Earlier in the week I replaced the battery as well. Altogether I've spent more than $3,000 since my arrival getting my car into pretty tip-top shape, so it should last me for a while.

It's funny how even familiar things here in New Jersey are a little different than they were in Houston. For example, when I went to the Costco store here, which is otherwise nearly identical to the Houston store in terms of prices and merchandise, but they sell Italian sandwiches with roasted peppers and onions at the snack bar to appease the large Italian population here. They also closed the tire shop for a half day in order to pump out the septic tank, something unheard of in Houston.

One thing I like about New Jersey is that all gas stations are required to pump gas for you, and it doesn't cost any more than what everyone normally pays for self-service. So you can sit in your car and have someone pump the gas and not feel like you're getting ripped off. Which is great because hands get dirty handling gas pumps.

: Job interview :

I had a bit of an adventure today in getting to my job interview in New York. I had intended to take the train into Hoboken and then a ferry to the South Side Harbor, which is only about three blocks from my final destination. The trouble began when I missed the train to Hoboken.

My problem is that right now I take way too long to get ready. I tend to look at myself a lot in the mirror while I'm doing my hair and makeup and see things that need attention, like hair needing to be plucked or shaved, skin blemishes, nails needing work, etc. I need to start doing all these maintenance things regularly, like on weekends, so they won't distract me when I'm in a hurry.

So after missing the train by about five minutes, I paid my $3 to get out of the parking garage (even though I was only in it for a few minutes) and drove to Hoboken. I found the Hoboken terminal without too much trouble, but I couldn't figure out a good place to park, so I just used an open lot near the terminal that cost $19. I walked to the ferry office and bought a round trip ticket, but I got confused about which pier I wanted, and accidentally bought tickets to the World Financial Center, which is on the opposite side of Manhattan from South Street Harbor. So the ferry dropped me off at Battery Park near Ground Zero, and I proceeded to walk east, not knowing how far I would have to go.

After about 30 minutes of walking, my feet were killing me (I didn't figure on doing so much walking, so I was wearing heels) so I finally found a subway station that I recognized and bought a ticket. When the train arrived, I got on board, but the train didn't move. Eventually I heard an unintelligble announcement that must have said the train was being delayed, because everyone started getting off. I finally followed suit and went back up to the street, wasting my subway fare, and walking the rest of the way to my destination. Fortunately, despite all the foot pain and perspiration which threatened to ruin my makeup, I managed to arrive almost exactly at my appointed time looking reasonably composed.

This PR firm I interviewed with is fairly sizeable - about 50 people in New York, and offices in Los Angeles, Seattle and Boston. They were on the 30th floor of a tower overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge, and the view from their floor-to-ceiling windows in the lobby reminds me of the views of offices featured in movies such as The Devil's Advocate and The Thomas Crown Affair. I snapped a shot with my camera while I waited for the interview to start.



The interviews went fine, and it seems like a good firm. They do a lot of work for high-profile charitable non-profits, which is always nice to be involved in. The only thing that I think probably hurts me is that I was referred to this firm by a headhunter, and I would guess that if they hired me, they would have to pay a pretty sizeable commission to the headhunter. That would probably be an incentive to hire someone else of equal quality whom they might have found through their own referral system or an employment ad.

Getting back home was a breeze compared to my transit ordeal getting there. I simply walked three blocks to the South Street Harbor and took a ferry to Hoboken, walked to my car and drove home. Now I have to tend to all the blisters on my feet - I think I'll be keeping off them for a while.

: Sightseeing in New York :

Today I drove into New York by myself for the first time to do some sightseeing and wandering by myself. I had it in my mind to go to the Guggenheim Museum because it's one of my favorite museums ever since I first visited years ago.

I was lucky enough to find a free parking spot on the street right next to the museum, although it was a pretty tight fit for my minivan. Maybe the next car I'll get will be a Mini Cooper. Then I found that the Guggenheim was mostly closed for renovations and exhibit installations, and only the first two floors were open. On the plus side, the admission was only $5, so I went in and saw their galleries of impressionist paintings from Cezanne, Degas and Matisse and some of the modern artists as well.

I came out of the museum and strolled across the street to Central Park, wandering on some of the paths until I came to the reservoir, where I snapped this picture:



I made my way up to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and signed up for a museum membership so I can visit whenever I want for free. I spent a few hours wandering and ate lunch in the cafeteria, which is surprisingly delicious and affordable. I had grilled salmon with asparagus and grilled Roma tomatoes.

I also went up to the roof garden for the first time in many years. I'd been there a long time ago with my cousin when I was visiting her. She was working as an intern for the Wall Street Journal in the World Trade Center towers back then. There is an exhibit up there by a Chinese artist that consists of three separate elements - a series of explosions producing black smoke that is launched at noon, a large glass monolith with fake dead birds lying at the base, and a pair of resin alligators stuck with all sorts of sharp objects that have been confiscated at airports. I wondered if you recognized a item that belonged to you, such as a unique pocket knife, would you be able to remove it and reclaim it? I wonder...



I left the Met and walked down Madison Avenue, stopping in a stationary store to look at jewelry boxes and writing paraphernalia. Eventually I made my way back to my car and drove back to Jersey.