Project Pomegranate: Midafternoon phone call

In the mechanical room of a hockey rink where I was working on the lighting controls... Thick layers of ice were growing everywhere!

Midafternoon phone call: ZOMG!

No, it wasn’t the provincial electrical authority offering me a job…Though wouldn’t that be funny right now? It’s been over a year since the interview!

It was the local fertility centre:  We got an intake appointment!

I was working when the call came in, and so couldn’t answer. I listened to the message on the sly when my foreman sent me out to the van to get a ladder, and it just asked me to call them back, because they had a date ready.  I spent the remaining couple hours of my work day fretting over this, cuz I’m nothing if not an over-thinker. My big concern was that this appointment was going to be like next week or sometime really soon, and all I could think was: “BUT I’M NOT READY YET!!!”

Luckily, it’s in June. WHEW. June 14th, to be exact… A month before my 31st birthday, which feels like great timing.

The only crappy thing is that they really really want a medical referral for Oats, too. This was a different administrator I spoke with, from the last time, and she was quite firm. Regardless of our intentions for who will be doing what in this adventure in queer babymaking, the centre’s policy is that partnered clients will each have a regular physician’s referral.

It’s such total bullshit, and a huge waste of resources… I already think it’s silly that I needed a referral, considering that I’m not infertile, just queer.  So why should Oats have to get one, when her job is to hold my hand while I get poked and prodded and swabbed and inseminated?  I mean, Oats is going to be very busy in her role as Chief Gestational Support Coordinator, but I’m pretty certain she’ll get to keep her clothes on throughout.

(Er… At the clinic, I mean. I certainly hope she’ll remove them at other junctures…)

I know, I know… It’ll be easy enough for her to simply pop into the same walk-in clinic I did, and see the same doc, and just tell him she’s my partner and needs the same referral. I bet it’d be fun for all of us, him included. It’s more the principle of the thing that’s bothering me… I don’t like the American health care system by any means, but am rather envious of how many options there are for getting pregnant down there. Not only do they have fertility clinics, but there’s also midwives and naturopaths who perform inseminations, and you can even get home delivery from sperm banks and then do it yourself! Ah, how nice that would be.

So anyway, yeah. Halfway through June, we’re meeting the doc at the fertility centre for a getting-to-know-you session, and then they’re immediately whisking me off for a transvaginal ultrasound. Which is probably about as rad as it sounds, and likely the beginning of a time in my life when the number of people who’ve seen my genitalia rapidly increases… Perhaps exponentially.

Why #2: Capitalism.

(For Why #1, click here)

Oh, hey, I live here.

This morning as I was getting ready for work, there was a piece on the radio about the skilled trades worker shortage. It’s a common theme, you’ve probably heard something about it: The journeymen are all speeding towards retirement age, and there simply aren’t enough apprentices coming along to fill the soon-to-be-available leadership positions. Listening to the on-air discussion, I grinned while lacing up my steel toed boots… Not only are there more and more trades jobs on the horizon, but us skilled trades workers are reaping the benefits of the effort of all those older workers!  These were mostly men, who negotiated contracts and wage standards meant to support their entire families, for which they historically were providing the primary income.  Which is to say, a “small” salary in the trades is a hell of a lot bigger than a “medium” salary in the world of administrative assistants… And let’s not even talk about the non-profit sector.

So here’s another reason why I chose to be an electrician: Because I wanted a living wage.

It’s fucking surreal sometimes, to really think about the fact that the best work I’ve done is also the stuff that’s contributed least to paying my rent. Earning enough money to not only cover my expenses but also get out of debt (and avoid getting further into debt) has been a huge distraction from all the excellent stuff I could be doing. You know when people say that they wouldn’t work if they didn’t have to? I simply don’t believe it. Oh, sure, I imagined they’d take a few months to veg out and clear their minds… But after that, I really do honestly have faith in the human desire to feel needed, to find satisfaction from doing something useful.  Wages get in the way of us finding our callings:  We’re too busy trying to make a living.

So anyway, yeah, capitalism’s not doing too well right now, in case you haven’t noticed.  Never having been a big fan in the first place, I can’t say that I’m terribly surprised:  It’s simply unmanageble, this twisted economic system.  Having said that, I’ve yet to visit the encampment of my local Occupy movement… Because I’m too busy working, at the first decent-paying job I’ve had in years.  How totally bougie of me, ha!

Seriously, though, it means a lot to me, to be able to count on making enough money for more than just my expenses…  And not just so that I can buy boots!  Hmmm… Actually, that’s a good example:  It’s a relief to be able to invest in quality footwear that will last me a couple years, instead of having to either continue to make do with the old (and literally crumbling!) pair or buy some crappy cheap thing that’ll need replacing in another few months.  It’s a small thing, but so important to my personal quality of life.  So: I have a steady union job, I’ll continue to get raises every six months as I gain experience, I’m learning useful skills that will make me increasingly employable, and I can afford decent boots…  This is how capitalism drove me to become an electrician.

The one that got away

I missed a phone call from my union. The battery on my phone had died and while I plugged it in to recharge, I neglected to actually turn the phone on again. The I got busy with simultaneously canning apple butter, making yoghourt, and brewing espresso, and the phone was the farthest thing from my mind.

So I missed out on a job.

ARG!

It was only an hour or so later that I got the message and called back the union dude who runs the job list. “Did I miss it?  Am I too late?” I asked.  The dude told me he was sorry, but yes, I’d missed the chance.

Fucking hell.

Overall, I’m frustrated with myself, because I should have been more diligent, should have kept my phone on.

On the other hand… Well.  If I wanted to, I could find a ton of excuses as to why it’s good that I didn’t get the job, so it’s probably better if I don’t spend too much time dwelling on it. Ambivalence, FTW! One thing I will say right now is just that the position being offered was with the biggest electrical contractors in town, and I’d really prefer to go to the shipyards instead.

On that topic, I’m watching the news reports like a hawk, waiting on the government’s decision on the federal shipbuilding contracts this September.  How ridiculous is that… Or rather, how revealing of the changes to my life since entering the trades!  Previously, my only comment on millions of dollars spent on naval infrastructure would have been to rant about the government’s misplaced priorities and to reiterate my own anti-militarization stance. Now, I’m all like, “I WANT A JOB!”  And I’d be likely to get one, if the west coast shipbuilding conglomerate wins their bid.  I’m still critical of the war machine, don’t get me wrong… But I also am pretty damn pragmatic, especially these days.

Dancing, dancing, revolutionizing

It was about a year ago that shit hit the fan with a group of folks with whom I’d been putting on an annual dance party celebration weekend.  I’d been involved in organizing that event since it started years ago, and yet felt like I wasn’t welcome, mostly due to my queerness but also because of my stance on the need for vocal inclusionary policies:  I wanted us to make it clear to all attendees that we were not going to put up with sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, bullshit behaviour, and that such actions would be grounds for removal. 

Apparently, this sort of policy “ruins the mood”. 

Hey, you know what really ruins the mood?  Being targeted for assault because of your gender, race, sexuality, and/or body!

Blech.  Whatever.  As I’ve written before, the good thing that came out of that experience was my decision to throw my energies elsewhere:  I got involved with another party-organizing group, this one queer-focused with an anti-oppressive mandate.

Together we’ve hosted 5 events in the past 10 months, including one just for teens that absolutely blew my mind with how rad it was… How rad the teens are!  Seriously, if you’re down in the dumps and want to get back some hope in the world, try spending an evening making buttons and playing board games with a crew of young folks.  They were so fun to hang out with.  I’m now friends with a couple of them on a social networking site and have learned how they personally face a ton of homophobia and transphobia at their schools. Knowing this makes it all the more special, the connection we made… Not to be cheezy, but I felt like it was actually doing something to make it better, moving beyond simply telling them “it gets better”.

Of course, in a lot of ways, it isn’t getting better.  I’ve sometimes been asked why I’m involved in putting on radical queer dance parties, when there’s a gay bar in our city.  Well, this is why:  In many gay bars, a commitment to supporting gender and sexual diversity is not taken seriously.  It’s all about being the right sort of gay, as Miss T.R. Gendered writes so well:  If you fall outside the “norms”  for your perceived gender or sexuality, you’re got to face the Gay Police, who’ll make you feel unsafe simply for being who you are.

Tying together my rambling thoughts about queer youth socials and the lack of safety for certain bodies at gay bars is a recent big decision made by my radical queer dance party collective:  We were approached by the organizers of the local pride festival and asked if we’d put on their official youth dance, in exchange for some funding and the use of their name and promotional clout.  After many long discussions that bounced all over the place, we said no to their money and credibility (?), but yes to the task.  We’d already been planning our annual celebration of queer resistance dance party for that week, and as we hold such events as fundraisers anyway, we decided to simply channel the profits from this one into a huge queer youth dance party the next weekend.

One pride week, one small radical dance party collective, two dance parties!!! I have no idea if we’re in completely over our heads here or not, but I’m totally excited.  I feel like we could have taken the offer from the offical pride group and it woulda been okay… Eventually, I’d probably have gotten over my initial sense of being a sell-out. Having said that, I’m thrilled.  More than anything, the decision to do it on our own makes me feel proud of us:  Proud that we’re willing to test our limits, to see what we can accomplish, to risk financial autonomy in a capitalist economy, to stay as true as possible to our mandate for providing alternative queer space.

For the record, we did thank the organizers of the local pride festival for thinking of us, because it is a tribute to our group’s reputation, that they’d consider us good enough to host the youth dance… And we believe that partnerships such as the one they were suggestion can be pretty great.  Going it alone seems to be a good deal for both groups, in this case though, since they’ll get to put their funding into other pride initiatives and the youth still get a dance party… And we get a crash course in putting on a really big youth event!

Does it change things, does it make them better, to have such firm ideas about creating queer spaces outside those sanctioned by a larger society?  I’m sensitive to stoking the flames of in-fighting among members of the minority group that is made up of those of us whose lives include sexual and gender diversity, and I don’t want to waste energy hating on those queers who’d tell folks like Miss T.R. Gendered to put their shirts back on… I’ll be writing those letters of complaint to the bar management, of course, and telling everyone I know to boycott the place, but I need more.  I need to turn this fury inside me into something pro- in stead of anti-, something fiercely loving instead of angrily frustrating.  Dance parties meet that need for me.

It’s not exactly revolutionary, to organize a liquor license and a sound systems and few DJs, but I like to think it’s part of a long queer tradition. Before gay bars were legal, in places where they still aren’t, all over the world and through history, this is something we’ve done: Gotten together to shake our booties, lick our wounds, meet new lovers, visit with old ones, share in a temporary oasis of fragile safety* in a world that would have us silent or dead or simply pretend not to exist.

* (Safety for some… Sadly, as with any community event, fucked up shit sometimes goes down at our parties too.)

Bleeding-heart tree-hugging queer.

The old furniture shop on the corner shut down this past winter, and at our weekly household dinners we all speculated as to what would next fill the store front. Instead of the hipster/yuppie cafe we were hoping for (as an alternative to the bucky’s in the plaza!), the New Democratic Party rented it and set up their candidacy office for this riding.

After walking and riding past the office a couple times a day, I finally went in and asked for a lawn sign. I’d never done that before, having generally snubbed federal politics as being too far removed from my daily existence to be worth the energy. I’d vote, and rant, but that’s about it. This time, though, I’ve been seeing far too many Conservative lawn signs during my commute out to the trade school, and it’s been making me feel ill. Besides which, I was raised by rather fervent NDP supporters, and have a nostalgic affection for neon orange.

“I grew up in Toronto,” I told the staffer at the desk as she wrote down my address for their records. “When he was still a local city councillor, Jack Layton rollerbladed to my high school to give a presentation on civic responsibility.”

“Did he bring his guitar and play you some songs, too?” She asked. I couldn’t tell if she was mocking Jack for his folkiness or me for my misty-eyed reminiscence, but it was pretty funny either way.

“He might as well have,” I told her. “But all the other politicians who spoke to us were stiff suits, so he got a surprisingly friendly reception, considering we were a bunch of bored teenagers.”

How do you decide how to vote? Do you go for personality, or party? Or is it more complicated than that? I haven’t actually committed to throwing my lot in with the NDP. My other leanings are with the Greens, because I’m a bleeding-heart tree-hugging queer*. I’ve requested a lawn sign from them too, which should arrive this afternoon. There’s an all-candidates forum next week that I’m hoping to attend, but really I’ll probably make my decision based on the party platforms. As I see it, the individual candidates are a hell of a lot less important than the larger institutions they represent: This country is just too huge and diverse. Having said that, my friend Jag is encouraging everyone to vote NDP simply because of all the options, Layton would be the sexiest prime minister. Personally, I’m not really into mustaches, but I’d be glad for a reprieve from Harper’s creepy fake smile.

*A dude I worked with many, many years ago called me this… Well, actually he called me a “fucking bleeding-heart tree-hugging bitch”, but close enough. Luckily he was pretty easy to write off as an odd duck, with larger issues than I’d ever understand: Despite coming from an extremely wealthy family, he took to stealing from the cafe’s cash register in order to impress the brothers at a fraternity he’d joined, and he actually did this in full view of the other staff. I’m fairly certain drugs were involved… It’s hard to be offended when someone is that out of it, so I’ve enjoyed holding onto that little nickname he bestowed upon me.

Model minority in math immersion

The entry-level trades program I did over a year ago was self-paced. This second level course isn’t. I thought I’d hate it, having to attend classes and do all the same work at the same time as my classmates. To my surprise, I really enjoyed the first couple weeks, because I grasped a lot of the concepts fairly quickly and so had very little homework. Then we hit circuit analysis, and suddenly I became the one student holding everyone back with my questions and confusion.

Fuck, I hate that… I already stick out as the only woman in the room, and having to ask for clarification from the teacher makes me super self-conscious. And yeah, I know I have a right to be here, and to ask questions, and to get frustrated just like any other student… But these are the effects of being constantly reminded that I am fundamentally different from my peers: I am determined to succeed and excel, to prove not just that I can do it, but that women can do it. It’s fucked, but that’s how I feel… Like I have to “represent”. Classic symptoms of a model minority, hmmm?

It doesn’t help that I hear this message over and over from others in the trade. I’d thought it was just me, until another female apprentice at the hydr0 boot camp told me that she gets the same thing: Upon learning that we are electrical apprentices, the immediate reaction of lot of older, male journeymen is to start telling us about the one or two woman electricians they’ve known throughout their careers, and how PERFECTLY BRILLIANT they are/were. I gather these men say these things because they’re trying to show that they support women in the trades. However! The actual way it comes across is a reinforcement of the fact that there’s a higher standard for us: We can’t just be sorta okay at our jobs, like the majority of the schmoes we work with. Instead we have to prove ourselves over and over, by being THE BESTEST-24/7!!!

Which is exhausting, and unfair, cuz really, as much as I like to be good at things, I also have other priorities aside from the trade, and I’m not always going to rock out 100%. I would like to be okay with that, and I would like my coworkers, classmates, and teachers to be okay with that too: I’m human, dammit.

Having said that, I’m working very hard, and so far have achieved a 95% average after four exams. Only 8 more to go!

It’s mostly math, which I really like, when I understand it… It’s getting to that place of understanding that’s the trouble. Going through this schooling as an adult has been an amazing journey in understanding my own learning styles.

For instance, I know now that I need to have all information clearly laid out and labeled, and all equations in sequential order, in order to make sense of it. My current instructor writes partial formulas and calculations all over the whiteboard at the front of our classroom, haphazardly drawing diagrams and graphing results. It drives me completely nuts. In the past, I’d have simply given up, mired in frustration. Now I plow through, rewriting his equations on my own notepaper, taking extra time but arranging everything in a way that’s accessible to my own quirky brain.

I also know that I really benefit from spending loooooooong amounts of time on the same concept: Entire days of math immersion really does wonders to cement it in my understanding. In high school and university, everything was arranged in 1 or 2 hour blocks. I never questioned this, because it never occurred to me that it may be related to why I struggled so much. Concentrated bursts of difficult topics, I’ve learned, are exactly the sort of thing that send my mind into panic mode. I get worried that I won’t have enough time to comprehend the lesson, and I’m so distracted that I *really* don’t pick up anything the teacher is showing us! So when I’ve got full days on entire topics, I’m more relaxed, and then I can follow along. My current instructor is forever apologizing for the length of time we focus on topics, but it’s just about perfect for me.

I can’t help but think: If only high school had been 6 consecutive 8-week long courses instead of 6 simultaneous courses over 40 weeks, I might have ended up an engineer by now. Ah, well… If that’d been my path, I would have missed out on all the great scenery on this route, and what a shame that would have been.

Donkey-work

It’s the last couple days at my job, and I’m working harder than I ever did in the past 4 months that I’ve held this position. That’s a particular thing about taking on a coordinating sort of role: The work is never cut and dry, and the projects rarely have a definitive start and end… Or at least none that fits into the relatively short span that I’ve been here. So in leaving, I’ve got to summarize the projects I’ve been working on, and try to convey some of the knowledge I’ve gleaned, and basically do what I can to make it so that someone else can take over.

It’s making me nostalgic for when I’ve left cafe jobs: I’d simple pull one last latte at the espresso bar, look at the clock, shuck my apron, and say goodbye. I’m even looking back with great fondness on the afternoon last June when I was surprised to find myself laid off from the construction site: One minute I was installing nurse call switches, and less than an hour later I was drinking beer in the sunshine on my patio with another (ex)coworker. It sucked in some ways, but it was also pretty relaxing.

Today, I spent 7 hours teaching my boss and my coworker how to use client management database software. My boss kept asking why we’d do it this way, instead of simply using spreadsheets, and kept suggesting that we needn’t bother with documenting *all* of our client communications in the database, just some of them. Look, I told him, you certainly could do it that way, and you might even do well at it… But then why did you invest in this software, and why did I just spend 4 months mastering it?

The entire debate was a pretty good indicator of the primary struggles that the company is facing, with few established protocols for doing anything. The other person I was teaching was my coworker who’d driven in from another city up-island, and she was similarly frustrated. In fact, when the boss was out of the room, I learned that she’d also suggested that she no longer work for the company, on the same day that I did. My boss told her that I was already leaving, and she felt bad, so agreed to stay, though with many reservations.

“They just don’t get it,” she said, “How much donkey-work goes into all the stuff they want us to do.”

Poor donkeys.

It wasn’t until the end of our day together that I learned that she didn’t know how to use the software for custom mail-merges, which is one of its primary time-saving functions. I was livid. How could they have had this woman on staff for longer than me, and never even taught her this most important of skills? She’s a great learner, far better than my boss is at understanding the applications of the technology, but has been given little to no support in developing this… Even though it would be infinitely beneficial for the company to have more competent staff.

So we’re getting together again tomorrow, for more teaching. Fuck, I’m so glad I’m getting out of here.

I’m still a little nervous about starting trade school next week, because I’m hardly expecting the atmosphere to have changed much from last time… But at least it’ll be a completely different sort of frustrations.

I’m not very good at my job

This morning my boss returned from a 6-week leave. When we sat down to go over the status of all the projects I’ve been working on in his absence, my summary was that I’m not very good at my job and I think he should hire someone else.

Ha!

I kill me.

We had a good conversation, actually, including him saying that it shows great self-awareness to acknowledge one’s strengths and weaknesses.

Strengths:  Chatting with strangers, getting events/programs organized, coordinating people/ideas/objects, creating things, self-directed tasks within a team framework.

Weaknesses:  High-pressure sales, cold-calling, repetitive small tasks that don’t have an obvious impact on anything, loneliness.

Look at me, all full of self-awareness!

He asked what I’ll do instead.  I said I think I’ll go back to the trades.  Obviously, he has no idea that I applied for the apprenticeship with hydr0, nor that I’ve been doing my security clearance for the shipyards.  I did tell him that I did not want to sit at a desk alone in an office anymore, so that pretty much precludes staying here.

Then he started talking about virtual assistant services, how you pay a subscription fee to have a team of people do your administrative stuff for you.  “In Mumbai?”  I asked.  “Yes,” he replied, and then went into this whole thing about wanting to hire telemarketers too but being concerned about their accents.  Actually, I guess what he was saying was that people in the province would react badly to the accent he assumes these staff would have, which is more nuanced but still based on some offensive stereotypes.

So now we know that he’s already been thinking of outsourcing my job. Awesome!

(On this topic, I highly recommend the television show Mumbai Calling… General sitcom laughs aside, the way it skewers every day manifestations of race and colonialism is awesome food for thought.)

Tomorrow I’m meeting with him and my other boss/project head, and I suppose we’ll discuss it more then. I haven’t quit, and they haven’t fired me, and I haven’t thought this through very well, to be honest. I feel better though, having most of my cards out on the table.

Among the ones I’m still holding close to my chest is a meeting later this afternoon with a couple people from a local organic baby merchandise company, who are interested in my suitability as a sewing assembly person. I’d do it from home, and it’s piecework, but I’m aquainted with the woman who started the company and it sounds like it could be good. I used to assemble stained glass panels and lamps for a living, and find that sort of crafty labour meditative. Besides which, if it really sucks, it’d be easier to quit than my current gig. Isn’t it horrible, that that’s where I’m at: Evaluating the quit-ability of a job before I even have it? Yeah, I’m really needing some serious career inspiration here.

Oh wow! I just checked my email and found out that there’s a spot at the trade school for Level 2 Electrical, starting in two weeks! So… Maybe I’ll be going back to the classroom for a little while. That’s always good for gaining perspective… Not to mention blog fodder.

Tell me what you like about butch.

“Tell me what you like about butch”, was the request from Bookish Butch.

Oh, this post is a doozy.  I started writing, and I just couldn’t stop.

BB also asked, “What’s wrong with femme?”, and that’s another good question, though I must take an exception to her follow-up statement, “It’s just woman in French”.  Femme, my online friends, may be the French word for woman, but femme is also an identity, a queer gender performance no less significant than butch.  If you want to hear about my butch appreciation, you’ll also need to understand my femme appreciation, because for me, the two are deeply connected.

What I like about butch is the way it distills masculinity and expresses it in a way that is separated from the cisgendered male body… Which is such an academic response, I know, but it’s the best way I can summarize my feelings. What I like about butch is that it’s a label that summarizes the attributes I find most attractive in a partner.  My butch is not always a gentleman, but she’s also never just another dude. She is tender and dapper and caring and competent, and she isn’t afraid to need me.  Also, she looks amazing in a pinstriped suit.

My attraction to butches is integrated into my sexuality, which is a funny thing to explain to some (straight) people: They tend to think that because I declare myself to be queer, I want to get with every woman… And since the worst of these people see butches as freaks, they refuse to comprehend me when I say that I prefer masculine women.

I worked at a cafe at the university campus for years, and endured several awkward drunken moments at staff parties when my young, feminine, straight coworkers revealed that their feelings were hurt by the fact that I’d never hit on them.  “Aren’t we sexy?”, a pair of them asked me, teetering dangerously on their high heels.  Um… Yes, I’m sure you are, dearies, but you’re not my type.  These women had met my girlfriends, had seen me flirt with customers (one of whom, I may mention, is now known to you as Oats: Being a barrista turned out to be a great investment), and to my mind should have had a pretty clear idea of my tastes.  But despite the evidence before them, they were confused.

I encountered a similar attitude among the straight men I met in the trades, some of whom took the misguided notion that inclusion meant I should join in with their objectification of our more feminine female classmates and coworkers.  “I’m not interested,” I told them, “Because  A) that’s a fucked up and sexist as-all-get-out, and B) none of these women interest me.”  I’m a killer of fantasies, I am.  “If you like women who look like men,” a young guy at tradeschool asked me, “Why not be with men?”  Because I’m queer and I prefer women, I told him.

It’s been a long road, to understand my attraction to butches, because when I was coming out, the butch identity was portrayed as an oppressive part of dyke history as opposed to a current articulation of gender. Like, queer women used to have to choose between the two narrow categories of butch and femme, and now we don’t have to, so anyone who is still doing that is suffering from internalized homophobia. Alternately, with the rise of an essentialist trans identity in queer communities, a butch was seen as someone with gender dysphoria who doesn’t have the guts to transition. Either way, there was no positive view of these women.

As a teenager and then through my early 20s, I struggled with this, because though I figured out that I was queer, I realized that I just wasn’t that attracted to what the mainstream defined as an attractive woman, nor the androgynal presentation that was cultivated among the dykes I knew. The trans guys didn’t really excite me that much either, reminding me too much of all the boys and men I was also dating. It was scary to consider my attraction to butches, because it seemed like they were outside the accepted genders both within and without queer communities.

Compounding my confusion was my attempt to understand my own gender. If I was willing to accept my attraction to butches, I thought to myself, that didn’t mean I should have to be femme by default. Yet I simply didn’t feel right when I was dressed in anything but feminine clothes, even as I also felt like I needed to wear baggy army pants and baseball hats in order to be accepted as queer. I’d seen Anna Camillieri read from Brazen Femme, but I still didn’t get it. Femme just seemed old-fashioned. Also, the identity was pushed on me by a couple of people I dated: They wanted me to be femme in order to articulate and support their butchness.

Understandably, I resented and resisted this, but unfortunately I also accepted it as the way things were, as though femme was meant to be an imposition, as though it was part of a dichotomy, as though butch and femme couldn’t exist without one another. Because of this, I thought I’d never date the butch of my dreams and I resisted even looking into femme identity.

What changed it all for me was reading Stone Butch Blues, and specifically the scene in which Jess, our protagonist, is horrified to learn that two butches she knows are dating… One another. It was amazing, to be inside her head as she processed her feelings of repulsion and began to negotiate her own essentialist notions of gender/sexuality. Prior to reading this book, I’d taken for granted my own open-mindedness, and while I didn’t think that two butches together was all that shocking, I suddenly began questioning my preconceived ideas about relationships and roles.

Slowly, I unpacked my reactionary resistance to being femme, and the ways in which I let that dictate my acceptance of loving butches.  I never intended to become a femme partnered with a genderqueer butch, but that’s the way it has turned out.  Oats and I found each other, after we’d each spent a long while struggling independently to come to our current understandings of our sexual and gender identities.  Our struggles are pretty different, and yet they’ve provided us with some really important common ground.  We’ve each got a hard-won sense of self that goes beyond the false dichotomies of gay/straight, man/woman, cis/trans, butch/femme, and from that comes a huge appreciation of the labels we choose for our identities.

Like Bookish Butch, I am comfortable with my labels, and I’m comfortable with people who don’t  wear them.  I support everyone’s right to label the hell out of their sexuality and their gender and their body or run around completely naked if they’d prefer!  So when I say I’m femme, I mean it as a shorthand for the collection of interconnected gendered expressions and behaviours that make me who I am.  There are many ways of being femme, and I am living but one of them.  And when I say butch, I mean it as a shorthand for a summary of the attributes I find most attractive in a partner.  Diverse as hell, these butches may be, and while I’ve got a special place in my heart for a particular artistic genderqueer sort of butch, I tend to crush out on them all.

It’s so disheartening, to watch you go.

The final installment of my reflections on 2010. Part I can be found here, and check out Part II at this spot.

2010 YEAR IN REVIEW, PART III
26. What was your greatest musical (re)discovery?

I became slightly enamoured of the annual Triple J Hottest 100. I’ve been downloading the playlists from past years and am eagerly anticipating this year’s countdown… Coming up on January 26th! Vote here! I love how many offbeat tracks make it onto this list, songs and artists that I’ve otherwise never heard of. Last year’s top track, Little Lion Man by Mumford & Sons, reminds me of the folk punk bands I used to follow, like Ghost Mice and early Against Me, and is still a favourite song of mine.

27. What did you want and get?

A home that I can rely on. Just knowing that my monthly rent cheque goes to my friends instead of an unstable landlady is a huge benefit to my mental health.

28. What did you want and not get?

Jobs. I applied to work as an electrician with the provincial utility authority twice, the local naval base once, and as a sustainable energy intern with a local green consulting non-profit, and nothing came of it except a lot of practice with cover letters and resumes. Having said that, I was basically handed the rest of my employment with no sweat on my part: The union gave me the construction job, I got the farm position through friends, and this current water system service consulting gig was offered to me by a dude I met at a sustainability event. Given how damn hard it can be to find any work at all, I’m lucky.

29. What was your favorite film of this year?

I was totally obsessed with The Karate Kid for a long while during the summer, and I still think about it all the time. Yes, I’m talking about the original 1984 version. Seriously, sexism aside, it’s an incredible tribute to experiences of race and class in America! I’m pretty certain that this film is how I first learned about WWII Japanese internment camps when I was a little kid.

30. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?

I turned 29 years old, and spent the day at work on the farm. It was a harvest day, which meant hard labour, but it was fun anyway. I had a barbecue party on the weekend, which was fabulous, with friends on the patio until late late late. K and W fell asleep on our bed, so Oats and I shared the couches in the livingroom with S, which was funny yet oddly sweet… You know your friends are your friends when they feel comfortable enough to crash on your bed, and you don’t even think to wake them up.

31. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?

If just one of my planned career options had panned out, I think I’d be more satisfied with where I currently find myself. However, it’s easy to say that, from my current melancholic vantage point.

32. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2010?

Ha! At both the construction site and the farm, I wore the same outfits every single week day, washing them each weekend. I call this concept “pragmatic worker”. That aside, in 2010 I made a conscious decision to avoid dressing in black all the time. As I type this, I’m wearing a cute royal blue cardigan, which would have been unheard of for me in previous years.

33. What kept you sane?

Thinking of the big picture, and focusing on long-term investments.

34. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?

Eh. None.

35. What political issue stirred you the most?

Fuck, I was a self-centred git this past year and barely paid attention to anything in the realm of mainstream politics! However, a lot of the energy I used to put into political rage got sucked up by my involvement with the local queer dance party collective, which is inherently political by its simple existence… And ain’t the personal political? So, yeah: Queer rights, safe space for queers, supporting grassroots community among folks in my geographic region who identify as two-spirited, trans, bi, queer, gay, lesbian, genderqueer, or are otherwise marginalized by their gender/sexual identities… And beyond my geographic region too, I suppose, if I take into account the Queer Canada Blogs project.

36. Who did you miss?

All the friends who’ve moved away and settled elsewhere. Fuck, I hate it. I know this town to too expensive and too small to keep you here, but it’s so disheartening, to watch you go.

37. Who was the best new person you met?

I’m racking my brain here to figure out if I even met anyone new this year. I live on an island, okay? And I don’t get out much.

Okay, I’ve got it: I met a lot of great new people when I worked at the farm, folks who I think will be around for further adventures in one way or another. I can’t single out any of them, but I think they are all pretty great.

39. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year:

I just spent ages searching through song lyrics and I’m stumped: There are no small snippets of song that can contain the multitudes of my past year.

And.. Here ends the meme-ing. Thanks for sticking around, and I sincerely hope that 2011 is absolutely awesome for you, because you deserve it.