3:07 PM:

It occurs to me that I haven't been featured in the "journal quote of the day" section of Mo's sidebar in months. Admittedly, the pickings around here have been pretty slim lately, but rather than writing some well-crafted, scintillating entries and waiting for one to attract her attention, I'm opting for the proactive, cheesy approach: the remainder of this entry will consist of nothing but stuff that'll look really interesting when quoted out of context in a sidebar. One of them is bound to click. I hope.

But, honestly, what do you do with a guy who bakes you fresh blueberry muffins using blueberries he grew in his own garden? Even after you've given him a signed note from your allergist warning that blueberries make you deathly ill? I told them that leaving "till death do us part" in the wedding vows would be a mistake, but did anybody listen? Noooooo.

There's something about a sunset that just... I mean, when the sun is at the horizon, and there are rays of different colors in the sky, and... well, I don't think I can put it better than Janice did when she said, "Like, wow, you know? Like, just wow."

The rabid pack of poodles swarmed across the campus, nipping at the ankles of all foolhardy enough to ignore the poodle alarm. The ferocious wave of canine terror held the quad captive for three hours and nineteen minutes until the wildlife conversation SWAT team brought the last one down.

In a dazzling flash of insight, it came to me. I am actually Darth Vader's father.

The first thing that struck me, upon entering the stadium, was the pickpocket lurking in the corner. Luckily, I'd worn a full suit of body armor, cunningly concealed under my bikini.

(Well, duh, it was a vivid neon electric blue bikini. It drew all eyes, so nobody noticed the body armor. Do I have to explain everything?)

(No, I don't know what a pickpocket would have been doing trying to clobber somebody wearing a bikini without any pockets. Look, this is just an attempt to get into Mo's sidebar using a bizarre image, okay?)

(Now watch. She's gonna ignore all the real attempts and choose that last parenthetical aside. Dollars to donuts. Unless this parenthetical aside screws that up. It's kinda like quantum physics; just by making the observation, I change the results.)

I wonder, sometimes, whether people truly understand what a friend they have in chocolate.

I wonder, too, whether they'll stop standing there in horror near the broken guard rail on the factory tour and call Security to get their friend out of the chocolate vat before she gets permanently encased in the stuff. Which would kinda be like Han Solo in carbonite, just without the stasis keeping him alive, and with a slightly bitter aftertaste.

(And, going for broke...)

WWMD? It's my mantra in troubled times.

So, after months of hinting around the subject here and there, I finally went ahead and posted this to a thread on gender identity on Beth's forum the other day:

...this is a subject I feel fairly unsettled about myself. I've always identified with women more than men, whether in fiction or in real life. I honestly feel unsettled when people classify me as male; it's just not the way I usually think of myself. And given the choice, I'd consider it a no-brainer that I'd rather have been born a girl.

With that having been said, I also know that this is very easy for me to say, secure in the knowledge that I'll never have to pay the dues. No matter how I self-identify, I'm still likely to end up making more money than a woman in an equivalent position; no matter how I self-identify, when I was mugged a couple of years ago, it never even crossed my mind that I might be raped. Given that and much more, I can definitely see how it could be deeply insulting to actual women for me to try to identify as being one of them in any way.

But where do I go from there? I've tried on the "woman trapped in a man's body" phrase for size, but it doesn't really work for me. I don't have a problem with the plumbing as such, which is what that phrase implies to me. There are days when I think I'm at least a bit transgendered, but there are many more days when I think that, again, the very idea is an insult to those who legitimately (and publicly) claim that label.

Which, I suppose, brings us back to the question of gender being binary (or perhaps comprising four or five distinct roles) or a continuum. The above options all imply the former to one extent or another, but I prefer the latter outlook myself, with my own identity being somewhere near the middle of that continuum. (IIRC, one of those online quiz things some time back had me as a "hard androgyne," or some such, which I suppose I could live with.)

This is turning out to be more incoherent than I'd like, but, frankly, if I try to edit this any further, I'm likely to wimp out and not post it at all...

The big news, at any rate, is that the world failed to come to an end after I posted that. Which, you know, is something.

(Long-time readers may also recall my surprise at the world's failure to self-destruct after I wore denim for the first time. Obviously, I have a very low apocalypse threshold.)

Still catching up... so, yeah, I'm getting an award from Queens College. Thanks to last year's diploma card SNAFU, I didn't officially graduate until the end of last summer, putting me in this year's class for purposes of the college-wide honors and awards. Mine is "presented annually to a graduating Senior who has a superior record of scholarship and who intends to pursue a career in college teaching." To me, this suggests that they factored in my attendance in a Ph.D. program, and further suggests that they didn't check to see what my grades have been like here.

Regardless, this is very nice, and comes with a nice chunk of change, so I'm honored and happy, and will be making a whirlwind trip to New York next week to attend the ceremony and pick up my check. This is slightly complicated by the fact that I'd love it if my sister were in attendance, but I don't want my father finding out I'll be in town, and I think the two aims are mutually exclusive. Oh, well.

(Incidentally, if you're in New York and wanna stop by, drop me a line and I'll give you the relevant information.)

This deserves an entry of its own, even though I don't have much to say about it. I stumbled across Johnny Dangerously on Comedy Central last week. The Weird Al theme song got me hooked from the start of the film, and it only got better from there. Funny, good-humored, and nary a dull moment. Five stars out of five, and I virtually never award that.

Presents. I'm never sure whether to write about them here. For one thing, it seems a bit mercenary, even if it's not intended that way... which is probably silly, because I never react that way when they're mentioned in anybody else's online journal. For another, I never quite know whether people would mind if I thanked them here, and I feel kinda awkward asking...

But, briefly, I did get a lot of neat stuff in the past few weeks, and to the extent that this journal attempts to chronicle neat stuff that's happened to me, this definitely rates a mention. So.

Birthday season began a bit early, during the end-of-semester crunch, at which point I got a CD I'd been meaning to get hold of for some time: the concept album for Z: The Masked Musical. Having listened to the album, I now understand why this play -- a musical version of "Zorro" -- never actually got produced. (Brief sample of plodding lyrics: "I can dine on roast pig / While the mealy-mouthed peasants are crying / I don't give a fig / As long as my needs they're supplying / Let them grovel and plead / I still take what I need / For my glorious gluttonous greed.") That said, it features Deborah Gibson, and it's not her fault, so I'm still glad I now own this.

Which brings us to the Harry Potter Band-Aids mentioned some entries back. I'm not sure what to say about them except that they feature several different designs, and they glow in the dark. What, I ask you, could possibly be cooler than that?

Then there's The Superior Person's Book of Words, by Peter Bowler. Let me be clear up front: as far as I'm concerned, there is no such thing as a bad book about words. Even the flawed ones have their interest, if only so that I can gleefully point out the flaws. And this one does have a number of clever definitions, and it definitely would have been on my wish list if I'd been aware of it, and I'm very happy to have it my collection.

Which that having been said, it is flawed, for two major reasons. First and foremost, its overall theme is that it presents lots of ten-dollar words, not because they're inherently fascinating, but in order that they can be used to pass oneself off as a Superior Person. The resulting tone, which pervades the book, rubs me the wrong way. Second, the author was sloppy; he doesn't bother to provide sources, and he occasionally gets things wrong. (He swallows "zzxjoanw" hook, line, and sinker, for instance, and that was debunked years ago.) In short, by his standards, I am a Superior Person, while he's a mere wannabe, writing for the benefit of other wannabes.

(It should be noted that the marginally better Mrs. Byrne's Dictionary also lists "zzxjoanw," which -- along with its failure to include any citations -- is a good example of why it's only marginally better.)

Moving right along... the same day (my birthday itself!) brought Pride and Promiscuity: The Lost Sex Scenes of Jane Austen, a series of dead-on parodies by Arielle Eckstut and Dennis Ashton, supplying scenes supposedly expurgated from Austen's novels. Simply beautiful, and right up my alley.

Wrapping up the list... lots of really nice e-mail; several cards; a mix tape; a Harry Potter journal, which is likely to join the ranks of items too nice for me to actually use for their intended purpose; several boxes of Murcie's tea, all blends I hadn't tried before; a notice that the official Harry Potter DVD will be in the mail shortly; and a "MICHIGAN ENGLISH" T-shirt. I find it to be cool that they actually make T-shirts specifically for English majors around here.

For somebody who's not used to getting any birthday presents at all, this could get a bit heady. Thanks, guys.

So, I had a birthday party on the evening of Sunday, May 12th (two days late, but Friday wouldn't have been a good day, from my standpoint), and it went well. I invited 22 schoolmates -- my entire Ph.D. cohort, and a small handful of others -- to what was billed as a combination party and poetry reading celebrating my 11th annual 19th birthday. I felt fairly secure in the belief that most of them wouldn't be able to make it, although I spent more than a little time alternately worrying that nobody would show up, and worrying that everybody would show up with a friend.

As it happened, four people came, which may have been the optimal number, as I have exactly four folding chairs and an armchair. I managed to get the living room and kitchen cleaned just in time (to the detriment of the bedroom, into which everything was shoved, but two outta three ain't bad); they complimented my baking (which consisted of putting some Pillsbury stuff in the oven and taking it out before it burned, but whatever); I and the one MFA student in attendance read some stuff, which was duly appreciated by the others in attendance; and a nice conversation followed. All in all, definitely a good evening.

And I still have some leftover brownies, which have turned out to be even better refrigerated than they were fresh out of the oven.