The Alternate Lexicon
Currently viewing the tag: "ali"
Eight years ago today, give or take a time zone, I talked with my best friend. She was living in Australia and I was just finishing up my first year of college at Mary Baldwin, and some time in the preceeding few months I’d realised I was having romantic feelings for her. Eventually, I spoke to her about this, and was surprised and pleased and grateful when she reciprocated; it wasn’t quite how I expected that to go.
When I finished college, I moved to Australia to do more school and to finally be in the same place as her. We’ve done a lot of international travel, gone on lots of vacations, and now we have a little queer family with the two of us and our cats. I’ve gladly stayed with her through foot surgeries and corneal transplants and a great library science program and lots of stories. She’s stuck with me through a slow-build autism diagnosis and lots of gender questioning, basically dropping out of grad school, and deciding to go back. We’re making my immigration happen together.
Thank you, Kit. Eight years and we’ll keep going from here. Every day is incremental and is the longest I have ever loved you. Tomorrow will be even longer.
So…er…hi. Hello. Attempts at keeping a blog: still a fail.
What’s happened since I last blogged? Well!
I’m back working in the mildly soul-crushing job I had when I last lived in Melbourne. It’s basically where rich people pay me to read the newspaper for them, and I pretend I live in a steampunk dystopia. This is enhanced by my now-regular presence at Rose St. on the weekends, an artist’s market where I hawk the stuff I otherwise have on etsy. It’s fairly effective, because hipsters like cheap jewelry and it’s in the heart of hipsterville (though, as I discussed with another artist there, the area is decreasingly trendy and we’re worried the hipsters are disbursing across the city). The job is full-time and I get paid a salary, which is weird but not unpleasant.
Kit and I went to Port Fairy for the folk fesitval, which I hadn’t been to in 5 years. It was great, lots of fiddles and instrumental groups, though last time it was ALL KATE ALL THE TIME, so I was a bit sad without that element. None the less, we saw a lot of acts I really enjoyed, including Ben Sollee from the US who I’d somehow never crossed paths with before, which is funny since we lived on opposite sides of the same mountains for a long time. Really great, weird folk-blues-jazz cello. Also loved both Beoga and Frigg, instrumental groups from Ireland and Finland, respectively.
We saw Kate a few times last weekend, and have gotten a copy of the new album Nightflight a few weeks early. It’s really gorgeous, and if you click over to the Kate tumblr (see sidebar), you can hear some previews. Much love.
My birthday was gorgeous, the first really fun one in years. I gave blood and chatted up the workers at the red cross about how I should work at the red cross, too, and then wandered around bike shops for a few hours before purchasing a gorgeous bike on sale. I am looking forward to a life of not being strictly beholden to the tram schedule.
In conclusion:
Well, that plan certainly didn’t work out.
It’s been a whirlwind month, in my defense; I feel like my brain leaked out my ears.
We unofficially/officially/weepingly fired our lawyer just after I wrote in January. Neither of us could stand, in good conscience, to stick with a man who told us he refused to take payment in anything other than a lump sum because we’ll just break up like all his other clients. Charming.
We spent an awful lot of time looking for a second cat to join our little cat family and keep Prosper happy. He’s been bored since we moved here, after getting used to having both my mom’s cats available for play and/or harassment. This has meant a lot of walking around and yowling, which I’m sure you can imagine is charming and not at all likely to get us in trouble with the neighbors. This culminated in a kitten, Madeline, who is the nosiest, bravest little thing I have ever encountered. Nothing disuades her, and she is rather fond of Prosper already. Prosper remains undecided, but he starts yowling again if we separate them because he’s playing too rough. Fairly sure he thinks she is his toy.
I’ve been driving a couple times with our livingsocial flexicar deal. Turns out driving in Australia is fine, except the windsheild wipers and turn signals are reversed. Fuckers.
Last week my temp job unceremoniously ended. I was apparently mean to permanent staff. In my defense, they were terrible at their jobs, made mine harder, and got paid more money than me for it. Also no one told me to tone it down until it was over, which is not exactly helpful–or trust building. I didn’t disclose the autism stuff at that job because I thought it was just a temp position, but I will be doing so in the future. Better to be up front that I am not clear about what I can and can’t say without explicit direction. Lesson learned. However, that was the worst job I’d ever had, so leaving hasn’t hurt too much.
And that is why I haven’t written anything.
It’s almost the end of the year, and I’ve done a rather terrible job writing and updating. I played with the layout a bit, but I’m not sold on it as a permanent fix. The 2012 layouts should be out soon, so I’ll hold out and see what’s coming and how I’d like to play with them.
Melbourne continues to feel strange, home and not-home all jumbled up together. The past month has been harder than the ones before it, as I find myself missing Stina and Dylan badly even as I’m growing into more and more of my own person. I read somewhere recently that it’s not unusual at all for autistic people, but especially autistic women, to lack a strong sense of self and identity–it’s something I definitely identify with (oh, irony). I have been so defined by that friendship for so much of my life, and all of my adult life at that, that I have of course been confused and lonely and unsure of how to go about being me separate from them. I’s been a good thing to mull over, thinking about how to deliberately choose who I am and who I can become.
I know 2011 hasn’t been particularly great for many people in my life, but it’s been positive on the whole, for me. I’m happy to be here. We’re in discussion with our immigration lawyer to begin my trek towards permanent residency. I have a job, albeit a terrible temp one, and make enough money to live comfortably and save for said immigration. I have grown infinitely more comfortable with both my autism and my gender, and my metacognition is much happier than it was a year or even two or three ago. While I am still sad because of Stina and Dylan, I am feeling like I am going to be okay.
Next year is going to be good. There are lawyer appointments and immigration agents to meet. I’m going to have a booth at a local artist’s market in January, and if it goes well I’ll sign up for more times in February, March, and April. I have insurance that will pay for me to get a massage every once in a while. There is a very, very strong chance we will get a second kitten to keep crankypants happy and entertained. I’m going to Port Fairy. Kate Miller-Heidke put us on the guest list to come see her for free, because we’re awesome. I’m considering scraping together the cash to take a course in Auslan (Australian sign). I found a choir I want to join. Maybe we can talk Hez into visiting. I’ll try to write more here, not just reblog on tumblr.
I think it’s going to turn out just fine.
Well. Maybe a latte instead. I love you, Melbourne coffee.
Melbourne can’t work out if it’s beautiful or the dreariest, coldest fog bank this side of the Pacific. Both make my current job temping at a giant insurance agency somewhat unbearable, as it is either all sparkling sunlight from the roof of Southern Cross catching my attention and begging I go play, or the sort of chill that makes getting up at 6 in the morning intolerable. Despite my protests to myself that I’ve gotten up far earlier for work, it was in a job I enjoyed and valued. This job is sending rejection letters to people who just wanted some massages or glasses or anesthetic for their brain surgery and who, for a host of reasons from filling out the forms wrong to simply not being insured, I must cheerfully and politely deny. Previously, I thought my job in Staunton, working with mentally ill kids who needed hugs, not locked rooms, was the most evil job, but this might actually be worse because it’s dissociated from the pain I know I must be causing.
It turns out that what I thought would have been a good environment for me, a quiet office with cubicles, is utter torture. I have spent much time lamenting the noise levels of previous jobs, and how standing all day hurts my legs and feet, but sitting all day in one spot has me a fidgety, stimmy mess. It’s blissfully quiet, except for the other hundred people typing and sighing and making far more noise than seems reasonable. I could tune out others’ conversations in the bustle of work before, but now they are bright spots in otherwise uninterrupted tedium.
So I need a job on my feet, doing things with my hands, even the same boring thing over and over. Soon, please. It’s getting hard to pass off the stimmy stuff.
Less than a week in the US. Feels weird. Words are a little hard to come by now that I don’t have to pretend to be fluent and fluid and talkative at work, which maybe says something in favour of faking it or maybe it’s just about regular sleep schedules. I have packed and repacked, abandoned much of the stuff I thought I simply had to have to exist, and decided more hair dye totally beats clothes any day, because awesome hair is awesome even if I only have pajamas and t-shirts, and manic panic is hard to come by there.
We spend a lot of time looking at houses in between my fits of playing the sims and trying to shove more stuff into my over-full suitcases and being sat upon by the cat, who is in a panic, too. I have chai cola. It is delicious. My life is inane.
I am feeling resilient and tired and ready.
In two and a half weeks, I will get on a plane and cease to live in the US, for permanent as far as we can guess.
When I land, I will be a new person. I will be neatly crafted, all smooth lines and invisible joins, not cobbled together of hurts and fears and sinew like I am now. A clockwork person; a robot made out of human bits of bone.
I will be Eliot, sometimes. I will be trans without being ashamed, or anxious, or both. I will be openly, joyfully queer (and if the immigration stuff goes easily, maybe even poly). I will be proudly autistic, honest about the disabling bits and all the good things. I will be clever and quick and funny and obsessive. I will make friends.
At least, I’m going to try.
What gives me away, in the end, is that I don’t ask questions.
It has something to do with tone. I’m never clear if I’m being given a small fact or invited to discuss something larger, deeper, more complex and personal. With a handful of people I can usually guess correctly, but for the most part I resort to ignoring these maybe-invitations; I’ve gotten that guess wrong far too many times to try it.
I very much want to know, that isn’t the issue. It’s not that I lack curiosity about the lives and inner workings of the people I am close to–far from it, really. I am desperate for a glimpse into how they work, how we are alike and dissimilar, because I like that sort of thing, that sort of science of thought. But I can’t bring myself to ask, waiting to be offered tidbits of information and never able to complete the follow-up that is required for more.
It comes out of a sense of not being owed knowledge, which I actually think would be rather an improvement for everyone if it was the baseline opinion instead of the reverse. No one should tell me anything about themselves, because their lives are private and what they want to disclose may or may not match up with what I want to know–and their comfort should always be prioritized (and mine, in turn). No one should get to ask me about being queer, being some flavour of trans, being autistic without my express permission. No one should be able to make sexual advances without my permission. My body, and the mind it holds, are mine alone to share as I deem fit.
This isn’t the default, though, so my inability to ask at all the right times is pathologized and made into a symptom instead of the polite respect that it is intended to be. I would love to know. I’m just waiting for permission.
