Good things Seven Seven

[gement]

1. Hot date with Bretts last night, for values of hot that ended up talking about self-care and social perceptions of gender and bodies and what we like about them until two in the morning instead of actually doing anything with them, with gourmet dinner and a two hour break for playing ukulele together.

If we weren't both birdplanes, I might suspect we were lesbians.

2. My reproductive system is behaving on schedule, which means all the appointments I already scheduled get to stay where they are! (Seriously, it's like planning a rocket launch in here.)

3. I hired Pepper's Personal Assistants (someone knows how to market to rich tech geeks) and have my first meeting with my Pepper on Thursday. No, I will not be asking to be called Mr. Stark. I will just be thinking it in my head.

The first email reply I got was so reassuring I almost cried. I'm really looking forward to this.

4. Getting masses of things done, including starting to consistently use an online calendar (no more triple scheduling dates, plz), raising my credit card limit in light of my now making wowmoney, and writing down all the stray "I need to" thoughts in a nice black book.

5. For being so (internally generated) busy, my life is feeling increasingly rich. That's pretty great.

Comments

[sistawendy.livejournal.com]

If we weren't both birdplanes, I might suspect we were lesbians.

*Snerk!*

For being so (internally generated) busy, my life is feeling increasingly rich. That's pretty great.

Yaaay!

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

I'd like to hear about the why and the process of the Pepper Personal Assistant thing.

[gement.livejournal.com]

More "why" forthcoming soon, but short form is I realized that the tasks I can't make myself do alone have been interfering with my life more than I can afford and that needs to change immediately.

Process so far:

1 You (or your friendly local reference librarian) search for personal assistants in your area. This can be plain old Google or something like Angie's List or Yelp, depending on your preference.

2 Look at their sites to see who has acceptable rates and a style that suits you. My requirements were that they advertise a paperwork and logistics focus and that I would build a working relationship with one or at most a small team of people to handle continuing projects and issues without repeating myself. (Thus I was willing to pay a higher rate than the services that just let you order a grocery delivery, house cleaning, pet sitting, or mail opening session with whichever part-time semi-employee picks it up first, like Uber for personal tasks.)

3 Write or call them with a rough idea of what you want, and if they are swanky enough to offer a free interview or sample, take it. See if you are happy with how they respond, especially if you want them handling your personal information.

4 Pay them money and start asking them to do things.

More on how this works as I find out. Pretty sure I will end up trusting mine with access to my voicemail and email accounts.

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

This sounds like a thoroughly neat idea. I will be interested in hearing how it progresses.

[wcg.livejournal.com]

Urban dictionary isn't helping. What's a birdplane?

[gement.livejournal.com]

It's not helping because I'm more or less one of a kind. :D

Birdplane is my internal word for my gender identity, when I want to explain to personal friends in more detail than "genderqueer."

It's a reference to the parody song Birdplane, by Axis of Awesome, which takes a sharp left turn from an angsty 90s song about Superman: "I'm more than a bird, I'm more than a plane, I'M A BIRDPLANE!"

They do a howling rock version of the chorus in concert.

How this is relevant to me: I have more gender than I can express at once. Really I have more gender than I know what to do with.

I used to think if I could just get enough masculine acknowledgement, I'd feel better and the "but I'm also a boy!" bit of my brain would settle down. Then I got that and discovered that after a couple days straight, the same part of my brain started yelling "but I'm also a girl!"

It's like trying to show a tesseract in three dimensions; something fundamental gets lost in translation between my experience and my presentation. But among the people who have talked to me about birdplanes, I feel like I can breathe better, that it's acknowledged.

This is also why I've been using they/them pronouns for the last couple years. It's not just the neutral and grammatically popular option, though that's the primary consideration. I find it pleasing that it also says, "I contain multitudes."

Edited to add: I have the extraordinarily unexpected delight of dating someone with very similar gender stuff who is about 15 years my senior and very comfortable with him/her/their body and social presentation, including really, truly not caring which pronoun you use. I find them a delight and a reassurance, and it's bemusing to technically be in a homosexual relationship.

[wcg.livejournal.com]

Thanks. That does make things much clearer. Also very happy for you, and your partner, that you've found each other. I wish you all joy of your mutual multitudes.

[grum]

Yay for words that seem to be working even if you had to build them up yourself.

I'm currently gendered as mama. Yeah.. there's totally a default assumption there.. but I don't tend to judge people for assuming stuff when I'm totally not correcting them on it.

And for a historical "oops, how did I wind up in this fight, oh.. I picked it.. crap.. how to back down??"
I nearly picked a nasty fight with my mother-in-law last Christmas about the correctness of the singular they. I maintain that I am right and she is on the sadly deluded, but currently winning side that says I am wrong. It went on for several volleys and I nearly had to leave the room because I couldn't come up with any good way to disengage. It was... awkward. She thankfully appears to have not really noticed just *how* invested I was in it because gender stuff with in-laws is just not what I want to be discussing at Christmas if I don't absolugely have to.