Floater's diary
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Floater
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They really are! I checked my new plant friend thoroughly and realized that the holes in the leaves were punctured during transportation by its own spikes. I'll go to the supermarket tomorrow and get the friend a new pot, repot it and try to find a good place for it - my apartment is filling up with plants at an alarming rate lol
I'll get fresh veg on the same trip, too.I had to get a bit creative with the pork shoulder, as it takes 5-ish hours to cook, and I had some old veggies I needed to use up. So I just gave the shoulder a quick rub with miso, garlic, ginger and maple syrup sludge, added star anise, kaffir lime and bay leaves, cloves, chili paste, cinnamon and nutmeg, shiitake and fresh red chili, thinly sliced cabbage and a carrot. Sadly, my red bell pepper had gotten mouldy, so I could not use that. Then again, maybe the white wine broth will end up looking nicer without red bell pepper in it?
Now I just need to wait for 4 more hours haha. But the pork shoulder only cost me 3 euros and it's a big chunk too, so this is something of a budget version of the stew I made a few days ago!
Floater
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Thank you! It turned out great, melt-in-your-mouth and juicy. The fat had been dissolved into the broth and the spices are intense! It turned out a little bit too salty (the broth lost a lot of volume during cooking), but that's easy to fix by adding water when I re-heat it later.
Floater
Well-known member
Likewise
I'm really happy, I bought myself a food thermos! It holds 4dl, so not big enough for hiking trips, but perfect for packing a post gym smoothie, soup or salad I can eat in the locker room or on my way home. I'll try really hard to make it to the gym tomorrow, this slump has lasted way too long already...!
Floater
Well-known member
OK, so my slump has been sitting on me pretty heavily, but I think it's starting to lift a bit. Good news: my next appointment at the trans clinic is on 14.12, and trans guy grapevine tells me that the doctor I'm going to be seeing/working with is really professional and nice to work with. It's a bit of the bummer that the appointment is in December and not in October as was originally planned, but it still feels nice to have a timeline. Should make it easier to get myself motivated to hit the gym as well.
Dysphoria has been quite the see-saw and I have drank in the evening for the past couple of days. Not ideal, but I think that having the pain and anxiety temporarily lessen has helped me work out some transition fears/worries I have been having. As much as I suffer from having breasts - they don't feel like they belong to me at all - I have been working through some traumatic experiences I have about them. So it's natural to want to subconsciously protect something that was hurt and it doesn't mean I wouldn't still want and need a mastectomy. Whenever I feel like I start to freak out, I visualize myself in a few years with a flat chest and an oak leaf and acorn chest piece tattoo
I made chili sin carne yesterday, it turned out great. I had it with salad, cheese, and créme fraiche for lunch and made baked potatoes for dinner.
Dysphoria has been quite the see-saw and I have drank in the evening for the past couple of days. Not ideal, but I think that having the pain and anxiety temporarily lessen has helped me work out some transition fears/worries I have been having. As much as I suffer from having breasts - they don't feel like they belong to me at all - I have been working through some traumatic experiences I have about them. So it's natural to want to subconsciously protect something that was hurt and it doesn't mean I wouldn't still want and need a mastectomy. Whenever I feel like I start to freak out, I visualize myself in a few years with a flat chest and an oak leaf and acorn chest piece tattoo
I made chili sin carne yesterday, it turned out great. I had it with salad, cheese, and créme fraiche for lunch and made baked potatoes for dinner.
Sad that it´s necessary to say but: yay for pleasant and professional doctors!
That´s really interesting. I´m someone who just likes to yeet anything unpleasant but your mindset sounds more healthy.
Floater
Well-known member
Well, in a way I yeeted/avoided my whole identity as a trans guy for years and years in order to be able to avoid/distance from the trauma memory. But then again, these things happen at their own pace. And if I were still living with that trauma fresh in my head, my transition process would likely be halted to ensure that I'm not trying to transition to escape the trauma. This is extremely rare of course, but once in a blue moon it can happen, and the docs are over-zealous to prevent it form happening.
I've been having a decent day, bought some fish and chicken legs from the supermarket. But it hurt like SHIT when I got into an argument online whether it's acceptable for children to pole dance and compete in poledancing, and I said I think it's a bit of an issue because pole dancing is so heavily sexualized, and now there are people calling me a pedophile and a victim blamer. Like, I agree, in a perfect world pole dancing would be a totally normal and neutral sport/entertainment and as such also suitable for children, but I think that where we are right now in culture, it's not that simple. I guess I'm a conservative, pedophile Karen, then. /HEAVY SARCASM
But seriously, that shit hurts. It's not exactly a pedo thing IMHO to advocate for children's limited exposure to topics and activities that are culturally coded as sexual. And it hurts even though the loudest folks who accused me of being a pervert were a lady who thought that child pageants are innocent fun and not different from kids playing with mommy's makeup, and the other was most likely a right wing troll who used left wing lingo to blend in and get a rise out of folks.
First off: I have friends who do pole and it's 100% sexualized to the max. Is it possible to work out on a pole without it looking like an invitation to have sex? Of course! Chinese pole is a wonderful circus/gymnastics discipline. But that's generally not what people talk about when they discuss pole dance. Grown women are allowed to do with their bodies what they want but kids don't have the kind of nuanced thinking required to deal with many complex issues. Creeps are definitely out there. If kids' pole classes exist they will definitely attract some creeps (as well as people who just find it funny to see kids do grown-up stuff). Is that a necessary risk? I don't think so. But then I don't even think it makes sense to have 10-y/o girls hobbling around in skirts so short and tight they can't run and tumble like nature intended young mammals to do. So... I guess I too am a conservative, pedo Karen?
Floater
Well-known member
Yeah, this exactly!!! Kids lack the frontal lobe power to understand the implications of it, and even if nothing terrible happens, it can still be traumatic for the child to grow up and later on realize that they weren't able to understand the full extent of something they only considered a fun hobby.
Much like what happened to me and playing the violin - it was my normal to be worked to the bone and have adults tell me what a cute little prodigy I was and how I would grow up to be "the next Linda Lampenius." She was a Finnish violinist who actually had the same teacher as me, but as she came of age she left the classical music scene and went on to play more pop stuff with an electrical violin and clad in a latex catsuit. The poor woman had serious talent but got eaten up by the industry and everyone in the classical circles though she was an embarassment, so it's quite the statement that I got told something like that by adults just because I also had blonde hair and played the violin... As a literal pre teen. Makes me skin crawl now, but I wasn't able to understand why it made me uneasy back then. I'm glad that Lampenius has overcome her eating disorder and has a good life in Sweden. But back then she was used and abused and then slut shamed to top it all off. They even sold cider with her latex clad pic on the label, my parents and godparents bought a few bottles of the stuff as a keepsake and thought it was really funny. (What the fuck.) I'll link a pick of the label.
I also agree about the dressing up girls in uncomfortable and impractical clothes thing, and the general sentiment that it really is up to adults to protect kids from dangerous adults. The kids are completely vulnerable if left to do so by themselves. The CSA survivor community is well aware that one of the reasons children don't report can be that they feel like they initiated the sexual contact. Teenage brain is not a sane brain and young teen kids can get really curious and may think they can handle stuff that they can't and shouldn't ever be put through. It's not their fault of course, it's the job of the adults to see that a child gets to mature in peace, even if the child might roll their eyes and protest. I think that context matters here: I would let a 15-year old who dresses and acts punk wear a spiked collar if they wanted to, but I would never let a kid wear an O-ring collar or harness or something like that, no matter how goth or punk their other style might be. But of course the 90´s plastic wire "chokers" and bows and stuff are fine, as they don't carry the same implications.
It's super sad that people might end up causing their kids harm out of the hard headed idea that sexualizing things is only the issue of the person sexualizing the things. But why would they then get so worked up about people who suggest it's not such a great idea, and that it's in fact taboo? I have the same frustrations towards the "kink at Pride" folks, who claim in one breath that O-ring collars and leather harnesses are inherently NOT sexual and the issue is with prudes who see them as such, but then also legit wear them as fetish gear and want to represent themselves as the fetish faction of Pride. Like, which is it? People delude themselves very expertly.
What a rant and a ramble! But I'll put the oven on soon and have the rest of yesterday's garlic potatoes with fried vendaces (?) I bought form the supermarket earlier. (It's a small lake fish eaten without the heads and guts but otherwise intact, usually fried in butter and rolled in rye flour. It has quite a strong taste but is nice every now and then.)
Oh, and here's the infamous Linda cider label...
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That's... just gross. End of.
Yup. People seem to forget how horny we (most of us, at least) were when we were teens. Humans with strong feelings about anything are easier to manipulate but the kind of feeling that basically shuts down your critical thinking makes it dangerously simple.
Floater
Well-known member
Thank you for asking!!
I had a lot of nightmares, but otherwise things aren't too bad. I have been eating a lot - prioritizing it on purpose - and set a date (14.10, this Thursday) as the date I'll hit the gym again. I have asked the autism assistance folks to give me a lift to tge gym that day, so I won't have the ootion to stay home. I have also been walking a lot, 10-ish km per day.
I had home made tacos yesterday, and walked to a burger place with the dog to get 4 nuggets, a cheeseburger, and fries in the evening. Today I'm planning to make a batch of bean and ham cabbage soup.
What matters now is to eat even if I have no appetite, so that I can get to the gym and back on track now that there's only two months to my next trans clinic appointment. on 14.12. I'm also thinking about taking a sober streak until that date to minimize empty calories and maximize my ability to recover post exercise. It's healthy to do that every now and then anyway.
Floater
Well-known member
Thank you, I'll do my best and not beat myself up if I slip up. What matters is to keep my goals manageable. I'm thinking gym twice a week for the next two months, it's plenty enough when combined with long walks and doing my best with my diet.
Slight content warning to those who are not interested in spiritual stuff.
Yesterday I spent quite a while thinking about faith and what it looks like for me. I often feel like a fake Lutheran, because I'm not really that interested in the afterlife or the permanence of a soul. These matters are inobservable and as such impossible to draw conclusions about. But I started reading the 1 Corinthians last night and it made me tear up a bit. Of course the text is not only talking about men/masculine folks, it's just that in the patriarchal context in which it was written, "man" stood for human. But I love how relevant this idea of growing out of childish things and becoming whole resonates with my current situation. It's weird to think about all the fucked up coping mechanisms I have developed to survive living in the wrong body. It's going to take time to uproot all that, but I'm in the process and that's what matters. "Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known." I'm not sure if this makes much sense and it doesn't touch me the same way in English as it does in Finnish, but it gave me a wonderful moment of peace and catharsis.
I just picked up a package of underwear from the post. I've been trying to figure out what sort of underwear gives me the least dysphoria and feels most comfortable. I simply can't stand anything with a waistband, so boxers are out of the question and they don't fit me anyway for obvious reasons. The ones I ordered are stretchy polyester rib, annoyingly they have lace and bow details but then again, it's underwear so as long as it fits comfortably, the way it looks doesn't matter to me as much. But it's weird how much symbolism such a little piece of fabric can carry. Then again, I'm sure there are plenty of hypermasculine business shark CEO:s who rock lace panties under their suits and who am I to judge. Maybe it's healthy for me to try and unravel that sort of binary thinking, because in a way I'll always exist in the liminal when it comes to gender, and that's quite fine. Liminal spaces are places of power.
Oh well, I should get the cabbage soup started, it requires a long stewing time in order to taste as best as possible!