Clint Eastwood

More charcuterie!

I had big plans to break out the charcuterie board for New Year’s Eve; alas, it was not to be. (There was - as is so often the case with these things - an unscheduled trip to the ER, which I’m sure I will detail at some point.) So everything got pushed back to New Year’s day instead.

My presentation is a bit lacking, and I wasn’t able to source tomato bruschetta or bacon jam; but the end result was still pretty delicious, and made up for an otherwise sucky time!

Dose two: addendum

I feel like I might have spoken too soon on my COVID vaccine side effects dying down; I’m now four days post-hoc and it feels like I still have some issues (muscle aches and swollen glands on the injection side; feverishness if I overexert myself).

It’s physically irritating, mentally debilitating, and it only fuels my anger more towards the sum group of people inflamed this situation for their own selfish reasons.

(I will also add: a couple of years ago, the spouse and I caught a very strange, persistent cold virus; the lymph nodes in my upper torso and neck flared up like nobody’s business and remained that way for almost eight to ten weeks.

It scared the hell out of me, as that kind of persistent swelling is generally associated with far worse ailments; and I was still in my passive ideation phase at the time and was pretty convinced that This Was It. Thankfully it went away on its own; but in retrospect, I’m realizing that this episode might be another unprocessed issue I now have to unpack and deal with.)

Phone

Today I went bra-shopping at the mall. At one point I put my phone down and thought to myself:

"This is just like that one coworker of yours - the one that leaves his phone laying around all the time. Glad I'm not like that!"

It was therefore inevitable that a few minutes later, I realized I no longer had my phone on me. Fortuitously, some kind soul had handed it into security; which I knew the second I walked into the security office as it was sitting right there on their reception desk.

What follows is, verbatim, the conversation that took place between myself and the security officer on duty:

Me: "Hello! I was going to ask if anyone handed in an iPhone 7 in a black case, but that appears to be it right there. Probably you want to verify it's mine; so I think you'll find the unlock code is ████."

Security: "Ah. Well. Can you tell me what the image is" - proceeds to hold phone very close to face, like a hand of poker - "...on the lock screen?"

Me: "Yes; that will be a picture of me and my daughter."

Security: "..."

Me: "...Of course, I look very different now. I don't have a beard, for one thing."

Security: "..."

Me: "..."

Security: "What was that code again?"

Anyway, I got my phone back!

Unexpected HRT side-effect #4

I have no ability to regulate my temperature anymore. At least, not compared to how it used to be. Blazing sun? Sign me up! Below freezing? It’s all good! But... not anymore.

Now, that in and of itself wasn’t unexpected - pre-HRT, I read a comment from a trans girl to this exact effect (and indeed, that entire thread was the inspiration for this series of posts).

What really gets me is when and where my newfound lack of temperature tolerance likes to strike. Today, I was sweating bullets and getting flushed because I was eating soup. Soup!

Well woman

A few week’s ago I had an annual check-up; the first in two decades. (Hooray for America’s dysfunctional healthcare system!) I wasn’t particularly concerned ahead of time; but then I received an automated reminder from my provider that had the appointment listed as a “Well Woman Exam”. This lead me down a bit of a rabbit hole as to exactly what that entailed; and then I proceeded to freak the fuck out. Even now, I’m not entirely sure what the problem was - there was definitely some anxiety centered on the more intimate aspects of this kind of exam; but having spent a significant amount in analogous settings (e.g. laser hair removal), I didn’t think this was the issue. (There’s also the matter of my PTSD cranking up in some medical settings; but again, there doesn’t seem to be a particular rhyme or reason as to why and when that fires off... or doesn’t.) A friend suggested that perhaps the issue stemmed from having to speak to my provider, openly and honestly, about my transgender status. My provider is a very nice fellow, and has a fantastic bedside manner (something of a rarity in the US); but even so, transitioning is in many respects a form of magic, and pulling back the curtain on how the trick is performed is not fun. When the actual day rolled around, my heart was racing; and I had to apologize repeatedly to the nurse practitioner for my ridiculous pulse. Thankfully everybody was very understanding; and my provider made the necessary conversations about as straightforward and easy as they could be. (It actually turned out that between various changes in recommended screening guidelines and where I am in my transition, that there’s basically nothing to screen for for the next five years or so; so no poking or prodding there.) I did elect to get caught up on some immunizations while I was there; including getting the HPV vaccine (which is now recommended for everyone, up to the age of forty-five). The administering nurse was perfectly nice; but her technique was slow and methodical (not what you want when getting needled); and the HPV vaccine in particular stung something fierce (which I guess is a known issue with whatever they put in it). In the end, everything worked out okay; but I worry that there will be more of this sort of thing in the near future - I’m out, and as far as the majority of big ticket items are concerned, transitioned; but I feel far from confident in my newfound place in the world as a woman or my ability to pass, and it’s going to be quite some time until that changes.

Dose one

Yesterday the wife, daughter and I got our first COVID vaccine doses. We go back in three weeks for the second dose. There haven’t been any real side effects barring the usual sore arm and some very minor feverishness / muscle aches.

(I have been lead to understand that the second dose may result in stronger side effects, which makes sense. An older fellow at the clinic told me in passing conversation that thanks to his second dose, he had experienced hot flashes and was now highly sympathetic to the plight of menopausal women.

This got a giggle from me; when I started HRT, my estradiol injections were spaced too far apart and as a result I would effectively experience menopausal symptoms. I replied with “I know how that goes!” and left it at that...)

Mentally however, I am struggling a bit. I will preface this with two items:

I am pro-science and pro-vaccine. I understand that no vaccine can be 100% safe; however, the odds of something going terribly wrong are far, far lower than if you contract COVID.

I had a very, very bad flashback the other night; one that practically set a new bar in terms of intensity; and I’m still feeling some of the effects from that days later.

So: I get very upset when I perceive my bodily integrity (or that of people I care about) being violated. The key factor is my consent. For instance:

At the end of my visa medical, I received two vaccinations. I took offense at (a) not being informed beforehand that this would happen, (b) the administering provider’s refusal to explain what they were for, and (c) the generally dehumanizing treatment I had been exposed to that day. (I have no problem with receiving vaccines as a prerequisite of entry to the US; it was how the process unfolded that was the issue.)

I have never had chickenpox, and elected to receive the varicella vaccine. Everything went smoothly, and I’m glad I made that choice.

To bring us full-circle:

I want to do my part to get us out of this pandemic; and that means being vaccinated. However, I cannot shake the feeling that this is being forced upon me - not by the nebulous puppet-masters that anti-vaxxer conspiracists like to point to, but by the various government institutions that prioritized partisan politics over protecting people, and the self-same people that prioritized their right to endanger others else instead of covering their stupid fleshy talk circles with a bit of cloth and knocking off the partying for a while.

It doesn’t sit well.

Alas, there’s not a whole lot I can do about this as the requirement to be vaccinated still stands; but it does rather mean that I have yet another reason (and I already had plenty to begin with) to intensely dislike the swathe of selfish misanthropes revealed during the course of this crisis.

'Standard Clitoris™'

Apologies for those that read the title with confusion and / or an injured sense of propriety; there is critical context here, I promise!

Act I:

Two years ago, I contacted Mt. Sinai's Center For Transgender Medicine And Surgery; with the intent of pursuing gender reassignment.

(The people there are lovely; but this was still an incredibly involved and rather stressful process, as (a) my health insurer required numerous hurdles be jumped before they would authorize the surgery; and (b) the Mt. SInai health system is located in New York, whereas I am quite definitively not.)

I ended up consulting with renowned vaginoplasty surgeon Dr. Miro Djordjevic. For those not in the know, Dr. Miro originates from Serbia; and while he speaks excellent English, he also has a flair for creating unusual turns of phrase that are as delightful as they are unexpected.

To transcribe this conversation (to the best of my recollection):

"Dr. Miro - what level of control do you have over the appearance of the new vulva?"

"Oh, Lauren; many young girls, they come in here with pictures of other women, they say: 'Dr. Miro, please can you make my new vagina look like this'. And I say, 'I cannot, I am sorry; for the final appearance is very dependent on your individual anatomy'. However, I understand this, and I will give you a very good vagina, a very beautiful vagina; you will see."

"Ah! This makes sense to me. Let me rephrase my question: once I am healed, I hope to have my clitoris pierced; but I understand that this requires the anatomy to be a certain way."

"Lauren, in many surgeries, you are the first girl that has asked this. But! The clitoris, this I can change! You tell me what size your clitoris should be, and I will do this for you."

Act II:

Thus, I visited my local piercing parlor; and provided my piercer with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to specify the exact dimensions and (and other qualities) of the clitoris that they would, in future, be piercing.

The takeaways were surprisingly straightforward:

The clitoris needed to be large enough to pierce (with an overall diameter of 10mm suggested as an appropriate target).

There needed to be sufficient space between the clitoris and clitoral hood to comfortably fit a Q-Tip.

So armed, I prepared for the day of surgery (a tale in its own right).

Act III:

It is the 9th of February, 2023; and I am currently sitting in the pre-op room, meeting the vast team of individuals who will shortly be participating in the surgical revamp of my genitalia (or the critical task of ensuring that I remain wholly unconscious during said revamp, but not so unconscious that, say, my heart stops).

It is here that I see Dr. Miro once again; and remind him of our previous conversation and my subsequent fact-finding mission regarding clitoral anatomy as it pertains to piercing suitability:

"Okay, so: my piercer says that the clitoris should be around 10mm in diameter; and that there should be enough space between the clitoris and hood to fit a Q-Tip."

...To which Dr. Miro wryly shook his head, and proceeded to hew from his English lexicon a brand-new term that has lived with me ever since:

"Lauren, Lauren! Why didn't you say? This is Standard Clitoris™! This is what I was going to give you anyway!"

...And so it was, as I rapidly drifted towards my robotically-assisted neovaginal destiny (and away from consciousness), that the primary thought looping through my mind was: "I should have known: the Standard Clitoris™"!

Strange bug

I had a very strange bug today. We have a web application that makes extensive use jQuery and a third-party JavaScript library to serve up some tasty-looking data grids.

In the grids are some date columns, which are to be formatted "MM/dd/yyyy" (i.e. "02/24/2021").

Things looked great on my local machine. They also looked great in our development environment. When published to production however, these dates suddenly reverted to ISO 8061 format ("2021-02-24T00:00:00").

Standard practice is, of course, to try and determine what key differences exist between these three locales (even though ostensibly there shouldn't be any).

Well... The libraries are being served up externally, so it's not that. The grid configuration is the same; so rule that out. The data is identical.

The only difference is that the local and development versions are compiled for debug, and the production version is compiled for release.

And lo! What do you know - that was the critical difference.

It's worth stressing here though: that's crazy. It would be like a car refusing to start because you added a bumper sticker. At no point, logically, should the compilation mode affect what's going on with the front end.

And yet here we are...

This Author notes that a combination of Unicode superscript numerals¹ and the ❮s❯² formatting sub-type may be utilized concomitantly to approximate the divagate³ authorial style of noted poet⁴ E. E. Foot (for whom the ubiquitous ‘foot note’ is so named⁵).

¹ The first three numerals are - for historical reasons - located in the Latin-1 Unicode block; the remainder may be found in the aptly-titled Superscripts and Subscripts block.

² Lit.: ‘Small’.

³ Meandering, digressionary; from the Latin verb, divigari (“To wonder”).

⁴ …And ‘poet of notes’, as it were! (It should be remarked that Foot was, by day, a dutiful, detail-oriented customs agent; and it is oft-theorized that this choice of profession strongly influenced Foot’s idiosyncratically particularized approach to prose).

⁵ This is, factually-speaking, a fiction; but fictionally-speaking, a marvelous fact.

Tumblr’s lack of support for sub/superscripts is killing my need for footnotes in my posts😞

Dose two

Well; three weeks later, and we got our second COVID vaccine doses.

Although I wish this was not the case, I went from zero to full-on flashback in bout twenty minutes; and expect to remain in some variation of that mindset for the next few days.

I would like to stress for the new reader: this is not a side effect of the vaccine, and I strongly recommend that (where medically possible) everyone get it. This is purely my past history interacting with current events.

On the bright side, in a little over two weeks I will start treatment with a new EMDR therapist. I am very much hoping that goes a long way towards bringing these sorts of undesirable episodes under control.