Twenty Years After Transition

My Other Web Sites & Channels

2012-01-16T06:45:00.000-08:00

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Me - also around 1994

2012-01-15T14:05:00.001-08:00

Me - around 1994

2012-01-15T07:17:00.000-08:00

This is the house where I grew up. We moved back there

in 1989, and this is where my diary was written.

Me (with friend) 1976

2012-01-14T10:10:00.000-08:00

Taken on my honeymoon at Lake Tahoe

Me - 1976

2012-01-14T10:00:00.000-08:00

In the back yard behind our house (from age 12 - 23)

Me - in 1975

2012-01-14T08:56:00.000-08:00

Me in 1975

Doing my job as a custom Black and White photo printer

Just before I left for USC to study filmmaking

And the rest is history

Two Responses and the Reason For Them

2012-01-12T12:08:00.000-08:00

First Response:

Second Response:

Original Video:

Caveat Emptor

2012-01-11T18:51:00.000-08:00

"Neon Soldiers" (1971)

2012-01-11T15:35:00.000-08:00

"Neon Soldiers" (1971)

Somewhere across country on the 4th of July in the middle of the family coast to coast road trip vacation. Another stab at time exposures. Again, a shaky camera (hand held) but the end result of this (out of many no-so-good shots) was something that looked like tin soldiers made out of light with their bayonets glowing at the ends of their shouldered fire-rifles as they march beneath the aerial bombardment. Sometimes what makes a snap shot into a photograph is nothing more than picking the right mistake and giving it a catchy name full of imagery.

"Memorial" (1971)

2012-01-10T23:20:00.000-08:00

Continuing to go through my old photographs, organize them, and archive them. Here's the current one worthy of sharing....

"Memorial" (1971)

At age 18 I was into "trick" photography and photo manipulation (old school - no computers). So, I took two slides, one of Arlington and the other of the Lincoln memorial. I sandwiched them together, using a paper hole-punch to create the circle that features Lincoln. It seemed to me that the combination of these two memorials, Lincoln, and the "little" people on the steps/grass made some kind of political statement, but I couldn't figure out what, exactly. Graphically, I like the way the pillars of the Lincoln memorial kind of line up with the sides of the head stones. Make of it what you will....

The Grand Tetons (1971)

2012-01-10T20:06:00.000-08:00

The Grand Tetons (1971)

The foothills of the Grand Tetons is a land of a thousand lakes. the cobalt blue skies, glaringly white clouds and snow, and the silvery reflections in the pools of water, all against the dark rocks and earth - all of this creates such a stark contrast that it actually hurt to look at it. My eyes would water from the intensity of the light. In fact, I actually had to wear sun glasses or I would have become essentially snow blind. Though you can get a sense of that from this scan of a slide, the reality is more as if the whole scene was backlit with an arc light. That is one reason I shot slides at the time - the dynamic range of the brights to the shadows was so much more intense than any photograph.

Weight. No... Wait....

2012-01-10T11:34:00.000-08:00

Me: I've lost a lot of weight lately.

Teresa: I haven't lost anything.

Me: Yes you have.

Teresa: What?

Me: Hope.

Then she hit me....

Robot solves Rubik's Cube in 5 seconds...

2012-01-10T07:57:00.000-08:00

From my novel-in-progress....

2012-01-09T21:27:00.000-08:00

"We are but a petty mold upon the dark side of inconsequence." (Line from my novel-in-progress).

Ego

2012-01-09T12:22:00.001-08:00

Twenty years after, I've come to the conclusion that my ego is too big to fit in any one gender.

My latest musical composition...

2012-01-09T12:03:00.001-08:00

My latest musical composition is now on YouTube under my performance name of "Tarnished Karma"

My latest article on story structure

2012-01-09T10:52:00.000-08:00

Narrative Space in the Real World

A soundtrack I wrote....

2012-01-08T17:26:00.000-08:00

Going through the archives again, and found this video of Teresa and me on our expedition last year across the lava field to Little Belknap Crater in Oregon. After editing the video I pulled together some old songs I'd written for the soundtrack.

This is on my music YouTube site under my performance name of Tarnished Karma:

Also from George Takei's Facebook Page

2012-01-08T16:11:00.001-08:00

From George Takei's Facebook Page

2012-01-08T16:10:00.000-08:00

"Candy Loop"

2012-01-08T13:17:00.000-08:00

"Candy Loop" - mp3

This is a new song I wrote and just recorded. Usually I play all the instruments myself, but I just got a new Macintosh with Garage Band and thought I'd fool around with loops, which I'd never tried before. Both parts of the vocal are me, each heavily filtered. (Neither one is my normal singing voice.) Amazing what computers can do these days! The lyrics are just one verse from a song I wrote a couple of months ago and haven't had the time to fully record yet, so I thought this loop version with just one verse repeated would be kind of a fun experiment.

http://melanieannephillips.com/music/candy-loop.mp3

"Glass Deer" (1971)

2012-01-08T09:38:00.000-08:00

"Glass Deer" (1971)

This may be the very first picture I took when I was given my first 35mm still camera in 1971. It is certainly my first indoor picture using natural light. I remember wandering around the living room, looking for something interesting - something that offered a really good composition. Plus, I was interest in "macro" photography at the time, due to my six years of previous experience shooting super-8 movies with my Canon 814 Auto Zoom (which had a macro setting for some really cool close-ups no one else could do in super-8).

This deer is about 3 or 4 inches tall - something my mom had picked up as a little display trinket for the house. I noticed the light coming in through the front window behind it and liked the matching colors of the sun and the glass, plus the matching curve of our front room lamp (the dark silhouette that bisects the deer, right along the legs, completing the curve and casting the trinket have in front of light and have in front of shadow, but highlighted from behind.

"Farmhouse" (1971)

2012-01-08T08:59:00.000-08:00

"Farmhouse" (1971)

Somewhere in the Great Plains - snapped this shot of this tiny farmhouse beneath a huge threatening sky. Really drove home the pioneering spirit to me, man against the elements, nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, and no one to rely on but yourself.

And finally, in a Beatles mood....

2012-01-07T18:23:00.000-08:00

What a way to waste a Saturday - screwing around with photo manipulation software.... Yeach!

"Hand Me Down Frown"

2012-01-07T16:03:00.001-08:00

Just a title idea for a Country Western song I'll probably never get around to writing.

Another "Photo Booth" self portrait....

2012-01-07T15:49:00.001-08:00

Self Portrait 1 - Just fooling around with "Photo Booth"

2012-01-07T14:07:00.000-08:00

"Touching" or "Retouching?"

2012-01-07T10:46:00.000-08:00

1971 - Outside Denver, Colorado. Shot this from the car while my dad was driving. I've always been enraptured by clouds. Clouds and also silhouetted leafless trees against an evening sky. I used to waste a lot of film on those kinds of shots. Now I waste a lot of meg.

This particular shot caught my attention because of the contrast differential between the sky on the left and the dark storm clouds on the right. And, I liked the silhouettes along the bottom which nicely support the shot.

Problem was, in the original there were four phone lines snaking across the clouds right in the middle. I always hesitated posting that picture because it ruined the mood - "Just ignore those phone lines and focus on the concept of the shot - what was intended - the majesty behind the imperfection...." Yeah, right.

Well, I've tried fixing shots but never found a program that did it easily and cheaply - until now. Recently I've received a MacBook Air. After years of working mostly on Windows, I've been playing around with iPhoto. And there's this cool little "Retouch" button in the Edit section.

Now I remember "retouch" from my days as a professional darkroom technician at Drewry Photocolor in Burbank in my twenties, when I did all the black and white custom enlargements for a couple of years. Eventually, I got so good I could spend all day exposing light on photo paper that I could enlarge 175 pictures, then throw them all in the developer at the end of the day, one after another, and every single image would come up perfectly and stop at the right exposure without having to whip it out of the developer into the "stop." (It used to drive my boss crazy 'cause his job was to dry all those prints that popped out just before closing! - Of course, that's why I did it....)

So, I thought "retouch" - hmmmmm... I wonder if the technology has gotten that good. I clicked the button. I adjust my "retouch brush" size. I whipped it along one of the phone lines and voila! - the damned thing vanished, like was never even there! Amazing!

In short order, all four lines were gone and the photo fulfills its true potential. But it made me think - does that same kind of retouching go on in life as well? Of course it does. In our memories we keep alive the parts we want and let the rest of the picture fade away until important parts of what things were really like - what really happened, are missing as if they never existed.

And so, all that we think is true, all we base our current decisions upon, has been purified, altered - in short, retouched. So, I'm keeping the original photo around so that I never forget the truth of the matter, even though I'm likely to only show around the perfected version to those who (aside from this post) will never know.

And I suppose that would be a good approach in life as well - to purify what I project, but never lose track of the reality of the situation in my own head.

"Negative Space"

2012-01-07T09:24:00.000-08:00

1971- Experiment in "negative space."

For those of you who aren't heavy into photography, "negative space" is an area intentionally left open in a prominent way. This creates an unusual composition in which the informational parts of a shot are on the periphery (or at least off center).

While one might expect this to create a sense of unbalance, the impact on the viewer is to force them to consider what's between the lines, the spaces that connect or separate other graphic components. It engenders a more thoughtful appreciation of the subject matter, much as one might one day look down a side street while on the way to work and discover a whole new micro-world or feeling that was always there in the shadows but drowned out by the blinding light of what's directly in front of you. I believe this was my first attempt at that kind of composition, which I have revisited many times in the decades since.

Consider, now, how you might apply this in your own life - to move your focus off the biggest and brightest issues and consider what's equally "there" but unseen What are the gossamer fabrics that hold you life together - the pith behind the circumstance? What's more important, the things themselves or the glue that holds them altogether? Both, actually. Kinda important to make sure you aren't just paying attention to what's in your face, rather than what's in your life....

The Care and Feeding of Your History

2012-01-06T19:47:00.000-08:00

Hey, cats and kittens! Today I'm continuing this new year's project of organizing all my old archival material. This includes all the music, photos, movies, writings, and even old memories that I've created and collected over the decades.

Basically, I've always been so forward-focused and innovation-seeking that I've never stopped to realize I've left this rubble trail of old ideas and creations in my wake. In fact, I'm kind of anchored to it. You really can't escape the past, you can (at best) stay one step ahead of it. A single slip, though, and it all piles into you from behind. Worse, every year you live that thundering beast on your heels is getting bigger and meaner. I'm beginning to suspect we never just die - we simply get consumed by our own history.

I suppose some can just turn around, yell at their past and shout, "Get out of here - I don't love you any more!" And others may pretend it isn't really there. But for heaven's sake, why don't we just face the damned thing and embrace it as our own, which it really is, after all?

Now, I'm not suggesting you have to carry it around on a stick and shake it at everyone you encounter... No, just that we recognize we have a trailer and learn to take those tight turns a little slower lest it drag us over the edge or, ever worse in a karmic sense of things, have it break off from us and go thundering down the road toward some poor bastard following us. Talk about unwarranted!

Well, I could go on and on. And day by day I will, you can be sure. But for now, I've got other blogs and other social sites and (screw all that) life itself to live. And besides, I still have to put out fresh food and water for my past before bed.

3D Photos

2012-01-03T12:14:00.000-08:00

Hey, cats and kittens! Recently, I bought a 3D camcorder - takes both 3D stills and 3D movies in the same format as Real 3D in the theaters! I've always loved 3D. I built my own 3D system back in 1971 (when I was 18). I bought some polarizing filters from Edmund Scientific company and set up my own 3D slide projection system and built my own viewing glasses. Used to have screenings for family and friends. Never could figure out how to take 3D super-8 movies and keep them in sync, though.

But now, forty years later, this frustrated 3D-er has all kinds of new options as technology has finally caught up with me! I have a bunch of 3D videos already posted in one of my YouTube play lists, but here's a like to one video made up of still photos from my new camera taken around the end of the year.

You'l need 3D viewing capability to get the effect. Best cheap solution - those red and blue glasses (anaglyphic). Just click on the little "3D" on the bottom control bar of this embedded YouTube video - YouTube supports many 3D viewing options and you can choose the best one for you.

Enjoy!

Melanie Anne

From 1969 - A Picture of Me from the Archives

2012-01-02T19:27:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year! This year I'm continuing my efforts to sort through and archive all my creative works and personal history. As I come across anything interesting (at least to me), I'll share it with you here (or on any one of my other blogs, web sites, or social networks).

So, in no particular order, here's the first thing I've come across - a picture of me from 1969 at a Presbyterian Church retreat in the mountains in Lake Arrowhead California (near Big Bear). I was singing in the choir at the time with my high school friend Bill.

We were both sixteen. As luck would have it, two sixteen year old girls were along for the trip as well. The event was put on by our pastor, M. Paul Messinio. He took over for an Asian temp-pastor who had taken over for a retiring long-time guy. M. Paul didn't want to be referred to as "pastor" but as "Paul." (He used to run a street-smart halfway house in another state and was pretty loose with the mantle of the office.) On his first day in the pulpit he had the organist begin with this almost satanic music, then strutted up to the podium in black robes with his arms raised. Quite a vision he was. I remember once when we were helping him put a new brick planter wall around the sign that announced the message for Sunday. The UCLA football game was on the radio and M. Paul shouted "Dammit" when they made a bad play. Weird pastor.

Human Sexuality 101

2011-12-26T19:13:00.000-08:00

Here's an article I wrote almost twenty years ago. It probably could use a good update, but the underlying concepts are still sound and quite useful for anyone trying to understand how they fit into the gender spectrum.

Human Sexuality 101

There are four aspects to Human Sexuality. They are:

1. Anatomical (physical) sex

2. Sexual preference

3. Gender Identity

4. Mental Sex

I'll briefly describe each one, hoping to clarify the Mental Sex concept. Mental sex is the one unique to Mental Relativity: it is what we have added to this list that most people see as only having the first three items.

1. Anatomical sex is simply what body you are in: male or female. But it is really not all that simple. There are hairy women and very slender men. Facial features can range from more "male" to more "female" regardless of what's between one's legs. In addition, there is the chromosomal nature of being XX, XY, or even XXY. On top of that, we have hermaphrodites. So, all things considered, each and everyone of use cannot truly be seen as simply male or female physically, but truly occupy a range on a spectrum. And, such things as body building can alter the overall physical impact we have, meaning that we can alter our physical sexually characteristics (short or long hair, nose jobs, sex change surgery) so that the line blurs even more. True, most people gravitate to one end of the scale that the other, which creates an inverse "bell curve". However, the line from one side to the other is truly unbroken, with more that a few people right in the middle.

2. Sexual preference. This one comes in four flavors: same, opposite, both, or neither. Regardless of anatomical sex, any individual might be any one of these four. What's more, most people find their sexual preferences depend on context and may shift depending on the situation or the person. For example, a man who sees himself as attracted to the opposite sex might not be at all attracted to a female body builder. If he were honest with himself, he would probably find some level of attraction to a very pretty boy. It is the cultural training we have that leads us deny and not even experience the capacity to shift our perspectives here.

In addition, people change over time as well as in different contexts. Some start out being hetero, then shift to bi, then to same sex, then give up altogether and then jump back in somewhere else. With the spatial and temporal flexibility in this area, each of us is fluid. But in the range of people as a whole, regardless of where you fall on the anatomical sex scale, any individual might at any time have any one of the four sexual preferences.

So, since anatomical sex does not determine sexual preference, the two factors are independent and can be multiplied together to determine the range of human sexuality on these two points alone. Already we can see there are a tremendous number of combinations!

3. Gender Identity describes where on the scale of masculine and feminine behavior an individual falls. Clearly this is a range. What's more, each of us changes in context as well. Men who are very macho on the weekend playing tackle football with friends might be very demure during the week at their job as a bank teller. And, over time, we all change. Most men start out more masculine than they end up at age 80.

Gender identity four any one of us ranges in a segment of the masculine/feminine line. Which segment we define depends on our conditioning as a child and "locks in" somewhere between age 3 and 5. Then, for most of our lives, we move up and down that segment, feeling uneasy if we get close to one of the ends of our personal range.

Now, since masculine or feminine is a range and does not depend on sexual preference or anatomical sex (we all know masculine women and feminine men) then we can multiply that in as well and create an ENORMOUS number of combinations of human sexuality.

4. Mental Sex. Finally, we get down to the nitty gritty. Mental Sex is the only one of the four aspects of human sexuality that is truly binary. Here is how it comes to be that way:

In the 12th to 14th week of pregnancy, a developing fetus will get a wash of hormones over its brain. Boy babies get a flush of testosterone, girl babies get a flush of estrogen. Testosterone has a direct impact on the level of the neurotransmitter Seratonin in the brain. As Testosterone goes up, Seratonin production goes up.

Seratonin is an "exciter" which stimulates the firing of the neurons. When they fire, the neurological activity of the brain takes center stage, and the biochemical aspect of the brain steps a bit into the shadows.

Let's stop for a moment to describe four aspects of the Brain:

1. Networks of neurons in the "ganglia"

2. Neurons connecting the ganglia

3. The biochemistry within the ganglia

4. The biochemistry between the ganglia

Ganglia are little groups of perhaps 4,000 neurons, connected together in a tight pack. The neurons in this group communicate with each other much more frequently that with other ganglia. Other neurons carry communications from one ganglion to another.

Inside each ganglion is a "micro-climate zone" of biochemistry that is a "density" of chemical interactions. The specific chemistry of each ganglion "leaks out" into the biochemistry of the brain as a whole, interacting with all the other ganglia's biochemistry, creating an interference pattern of currents and eddies in biochemical composition and density.

So, there are four different aspects of the brain, from which our capacity to sense Mass, Energy, Space and Time, are created.

When Testosterone is present for that 2 week period before birth, the neurology is favored and that affects the "focus" of energy in the brain to favor the spatial view.

When Dopamine is the hormone wash over the brain of the developing fetus, neurological activity is suppressed, focusing the energy in the brain toward favoring the temporal view.

After two weeks, the hormone wash recedes, leaving behind no physical trace, but instead a "dynamic" impact that forms a bias which is the foundation of self-awareness.

Before the wash of hormones, the brain neither favors space nor time. As a result, information coming in through the senses is equally handled and distributed by both sides, leading to an unbiased "view". But without bias, there is no "point" of view, and hence, no mind.

The hormone wash acts as an ocean wave on the shore, wiping out all existing information, and then receding, leaving a clean slate in its wake. But during that two week period, there is a biochemical bias toward the neurology or the biochemistry which then allows for an orderly handling and distribution of information, favoring either space or time. Once the wave recedes, the biochemical bias is gone, but the dynamic bias caused by "choosing" one method of organizing data over the other remains, forming the foundation of consciousness.

So, there are two kinds of consciousness on this planet: those of a spatial foundation and those of a temporal foundation. They are as unalike as two alien species.

Spatial thinkers look outward and first see things in terms of their arrangement and where it leads. Temporal things first look inward and see things in terms of what they mean and how they are going.
If that's all there was to the human mind, men (the spatially biased thinkers) and women (the temporally biased thinkers) would find no common ground for communication. But, Mental sex is only one aspect of the mind.

Let me draw an "L" shaped image here:

1. Anatomical Sex

2. Sexual Preference

3. Gender Identity

4. Mental Sex

That forms the vertical arm of the L.

Now, at the same point as Mental sex, let us create a horizontal arm for the L, as if we were using the X and Y axes of a geometric graph.

1. Pre-conscious 2. Subconscious 3. Memory 4. Consciousness

Mental Sex is only found in the Preconscious. It is the PRE conscious because that spatial or temporal bias filter everything else that follows.

If we are spatial thinkers, no matter how much we try to get into our emotions, we will always have some aspect of logic blended in. We can't help analyzing, even when we aren't aware of it. If we are temporal thinkers, no matter how much we try to be logical, we will always have some aspect of emotion blended in. We can't get rid of our passion, even when we think we are being absolutely reasonable. Beginning to sound like men and women to you?

But on top of that Pre-conscious are three other aspects of the mind.

The Subconscious is made up of the "mean average" of all of our experiences. We cannot see in it specific images, but only feel the pull of attractions and repulsions it engenders. Suppose we observe with our consciousness a set of vertical parallel lines. We file that away in our memory, then observe a set of horizontal parallel lines. We file that in memory. Consciousness has observed it, memory has stored it. Whenever we want to access it, we can call upon our memory and "pull up" either the vertical or horizontal lines, whichever we want.

But the subconscious gets the "drift down" from the memory. First it experienced the vertical parallel lines. Next it experienced the horizontal parallel lines. The two images are blended rather than being held separate as in memory. So, the subconscious is most affects by the points at which the two sets of lines intersect, creating a "double dose" of exposure at the four points where the lines intersect.

The subconscious, then, will be more sensitized to any observation involving four points, even though four points were never observed in reality. This is where creative thought happens.

The point here, is that the subconscious, through the averaging of personal experience (though exposure to parents, peers, and the media) can end up more "pulled" toward the spatial or the temporal, regardless of Mental Sex. Similarly, specific training or memories may make the responses we have more geared toward the spatial or temporal. And finally, at any moment, each of us can decide that it is best to view things either by how they are, or how they are going.

So, Mental Sex itself is only a bias, not a black and white either/or situation. On top of that, our specific life experience may result in a bias more toward spatial or temporal attractions in our subconscious. Our training and conditioning may lead our memories to be more "triggered" by and more fluent in spatial or temporal imagery, and our momentary situation may bend our consciousness more toward the spatial (logistic) or temporal (emotional).

Emotions are just as accurate for temporal issues as Logic is for spatial issues. Male and Female Mental Sex determines which one is most clear to any individual. The other three levels of the mind my match or mismatch that bias, creating, level by level, as complex a mental process as the four levels of human sexuality create in our relationships with one another.

Christmas Greetings!

2011-12-26T10:43:00.001-08:00

I have a dream.....

2011-12-14T02:57:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I dream of boobs. Sometimes I dream of hairy chests. But I never dream of hairy boobs.

Illume

2011-10-31T20:24:00.000-07:00

Illume

By Melanie Anne Phillips

In the quiet of the night,

My heart wakens,

Flying free above a land Ido not know.

And yet, familiar is the realmbelow.

It stirs some long forgottenharmony,

Of hazy evenings past.

There was a time,

(do not lament),

there is a time again….

Here, in this moment, thisfeeling,

I soar above my mind,

Upon the winds of whimsy.

An open heart,

Free and clear,

The moment, the moment,unending.

All is transient, yet whatremains?

Is it the ripples of ourpassing,

That holds the truth of us?

Perhaps when our essence,

Resounds against the rocksof other souls,

Do we, ourselves, take form?

Or is concept,

That unique beat of eachsingular heart,

Sufficient to the task,alone?

Soliloquy, conceived,received

Which most embodiessubstance?

Does form outweigh the rawemergence of experience?

Or are they twins,

Joined at the thought,‘twixt heaven and earth,

And me and you?

We bob in the same seas,

We drink the same air,

We see in you, ourselves.

Yet we are unalike as well,

Sparks from the same fire,

Water from the same well.

We run deep,

run amuck,

run away.

Yet the yearning,

To truly be,

Draws us all together.

The soft warm breeze,

Embraces my face,

In my waking dream.

The night,

So oft an echoed chamber stalkedby fears,

Becomes a gentle blanket ofcomfort, soft and full.

And all sins of the past,

Are not forgiven,

But washed away.

And all fears for thefuture,

Are not calmed,

But banished.

And the present, everchanging and uncertain,

Becomes serendipitous andcapricious,

And rather more the spritethan the trail sign of fate.

In the darkness,

All is bright,

Within the radiance of myheart.

Reviews of a horror film I directed in the 1980s

2011-10-26T08:55:00.001-07:00

Click the link to read Amazon.com reviews for a horror film I directed in the 1980s. Scroll down on the page to see one customer's video review, if you dare.....

http://www.amazon.com/Strangeness-Dan-Lunham/product-reviews/B002JUP8GA/ref=cm_cr_dp_synop?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=0&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending#R1ZWBAK47791KS

From our recent backpacking trip to Mount Jefferson

2011-10-24T13:35:00.001-07:00

Breakfast on the Trail - Teresa and Me....

2011-10-24T12:57:00.000-07:00

Me, doing a running commentary in my "old miner" voice about the glories of Spam on the trail during our recent backpacking expedition to Mount Jefferson, Oregon...

What I do for a living....

2011-10-24T12:34:00.000-07:00

I've been in the movie biz most of my life, writing, directing, editing. In fact, I made my first movie when I was 12, later going on to direct a couple of low budget features. Here's a couple of links to one of them: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0234817/ and http://web.me.com/chris_huntley/The_Strangeness/Welcome.html

But, that was years ago. For the past couple of decades I've focused on teaching writers how to write better stories. Here's a couple of links to two of my web sites: http://dramaticapedia.com/ and http://storymind.com

And that is my essay for "What I Do for a Living" and I hope I get a good grade on this report....

Shot this out our back window this morning....

2011-10-23T11:56:00.001-07:00

"Blackbird" cover by Salvatore Manalo

2011-10-23T10:28:00.000-07:00

The Women's Room at WB

2011-10-16T16:31:00.000-07:00

When I fly down to California to work with my partners, the restroom down the hall from their offices has a motion sensor to turn the lights on and off.

It works great when you walk in, and does fine if you are just washing your hands, checking your hair or have a quick pee. But anything more than that, and the damn thing snaps off, leaving you in total darkness.

Of course, you can sit there in the dark waving your arms wildly around and eventually it will get the message and snap back on - bur only long enough to get back to business. No sooner has everything settled down enough to continue, but it snaps off again!

At first, I tried cursing at it, but found (not surprising for a motion detector) that it responds best to crude gestures.

Eventually, you just settle into an ongoing game with the wretched thing of waving and clenching until the job is done or the urge passes.

A Tale of Two Homes

2011-10-14T07:31:00.000-07:00

Today's my last full day in California before I fly back to Oregon early tomorrow morning - Saturday at home!!!

Actually, I sort of have two homes, I guess. I was born in California and lived my first 45 years in Burbank. Since then, I've trapsed slowly north, first high up in the mountains between L.A. and Bakersfield. Then, high up in the Sierras about half-way between Sacramento and Lake Tahoe. Finally (at least for now) I ended up in Oregon near Portland.

Teresa and I have made that journey together, and in fact have recently celebrated our 13th anniversary together. So, home is where the Teresa is. But, I also have a home in California. I still co-own the house in Burbank with my wife (to whom I'm still married), and my son and his fiance live there as well. (My daughter and her husband live nearby (they are currently in transit to Michican for a gathering of his relatives).

So, there's always a bit of a sticky logistic, being pulled between two homes. In the past, as I've moved further and further north due to Teresa's and my love for the Pacific Northwest, trips down to the old stomping ground became more expensive and more disruptive.

I've tried driving down, taking the train and flying. Haven't tried a cruise yet, nor teleportation (wouldn't that be nice?) So, in the past few years I was lucky if I could get down for a few days every couple of months or so. We've always been a tight family, so it was kinda sorrowful to have so much of a gap between visits.

But, about 14 months ago we were approached by the industrial development arm of a major university with a goverment project they wanted us to work on. Oh, by "us" I mean my business partners. Some twenty years ago, one of them and myself co-created the Dramatica Theory of Story Structure and then with the other one (who owned an entertainment industry software company - one of the first, for which they later got an Academy Award for technical achievement) - with that guy, our little group of three musketeers created what became the best-selling and most revolutionary story development software in the history of the planet. It still is, and what's more, the first major upgrade in 12 years is just around the corner!

Well, the ol' university said that the government wanted to use our narrative science concepts and software to help keep America seccure. Naturally, we all jumped on board immediately. Oh, and they also wanted to pay us huge sums of money.

Well, it all sounded like pie in the sky, but it was in our field, of great interest on its own right, a chance to do something for our counrty, and with the possibility of BUCKS. So, I started making more frequent trips down here, meeting with all these folk from DC and some of the high rollers at the university.

The byproduct of all this is the chance to see my kids, friends, wife a lot more often, and soak up some of that California sun and fond childhood memories. The downside is having to leave Teresa back in Oregon for a week at a time. She hates LA and refuses to set foot in it.

Of course, when we were closer on our way north, Teresa became a part of the whole, odd, extended family, and we all shared holidays and birthday and cookouts and hikes together. She helps me in the work I do with my business partners, and also pretty much runs the little company I started to sell products to writers to help them find their Muse and get that story cranked out.

After a year of repeated trips, demonstrations, presentations, articles and artwork, we got the government contract, which is really just a proof-of-concept that our system can do what we say it can. (It can, by the way.) If all goes well, this will turn into a full-fledged program of ongoing development run by the university and pretty much centered around our work.

So, for the last two months, now that we're actually employed at this, I've been down a lot more. And you know, its funny but when you love people, be they family or friends, it only takes a day to pick up right where you left off in the relationship.

I've had so many fun times with my son and daughter and even with my wife, not to mention with my partners whom I adore and very muich enjoy working with again after all these years. If I'm down here for just a few days, I usually just sleep on the couch in the house with family, which is where I'm typing this from right now. Sometimes I stay at my partner's place for a while, occassionally at my daughter's place, and if all else fails I just grit my teeth and pony up for a motel room.

Well, I have to hit the shower as it is getting to be that time and I have this one more work day at my partner's offices before I head back home tomorrow. There's a lot I want to get accomplished before I leave, so I'd best git to it!

Point of this whole rambling thing? Guess it's this: I used to be miserable because I wanted my life with Teresa up north and also my life with my kids and friends in LA. I bitched and moaned and complained and lamented and cried for years (not constantly, mind you - just when I'd been away from LA for more than a month or away from home up north for more than a week).

But the answer was in front of me all the time - you can have anything you want - just not necessesarily at the same time in the same place.

Armed with that understanding, I don't complain any more - well, any more than I normally do. Nope. I can have it all - just some here and some there, some now and some later - rinse, and repeat.

Reporting from the front lines in Burbank, California, this is your travelling aging gender goddess, business mogul, pscyhology theory pioneer, father/mother husband/wife sort of kind of thing - sort of, and intrepid reporter, Melanie Anne Phillips.

(Oh, and humble. I forgot to say, "humble.")

TG Friends vs. TG Interest

2011-10-11T10:51:00.000-07:00

For over ten years now, I've pulled away from any direct personal involvement in the TG community. And, as an interest or vocation I rarely publish anything on the topic any more at all. I still have an interest in the topic, intellectually, but since my personal journey ended a long time ago, I really have very little tolerance for all the self-exploration and emotional anguish that broadcasts out of the community or from individuals that may cross my path. After all, why does anyone go through all this stuff - to stay mired in the emotional pain when you are finished?

I have a lot of followers on social media. Many of them come from my twenty years as co-creator of a theory of story and the software that employs it as a tool for writers. I create new story theory for a living, and am right now, in fact, just starting a big one-year government contract to apply our theories to benefit U.S., citizens in the real world. So, it is really unusual that my thoughts turn to the "good old days" of transition.

But, recently, I signed up for a new social media site. For the first month, all those who contacted me were from the writing and narrative theory world. But two days ago, I suddenly had over twenty folks in one day who started following me - and all of them are from the TG community. Now, two days later, there are more than forty!

Man, are they going to be disappointed - most of them anyway. And that's because all I publish on this social site are my essays on story structure, original music I've composed, some of my photography and other art. Nothing ever gets published there about TG stuff because, one - I don't hardly ever write anything about that and, two - it would really be off-putting to all those other followers who are interested in my art and my science.

I'm sure that after a few days of getting nothing about TG stuff, many of those followers will drift away, and that's as it should be. I know I've written thousands of pages of material on that subject long in the past, and for that I appreciate being appreciated. But these days my focus is all on this other work I've been doing for over twenty years now.

Still an all, I've been thinking of posting more stuff here in the future. But not about my personal journey or even directly talking about the journeys of others. Rather, I'm into the nature of how the mind works these days, or intrigued with societal patterns. And so, while the entire TG support web site I built will remain with all my writings and recordings to help others on their journeys, this space is going either have to adapt to who I am now, or not be tended.

I just wrote an email to Teresa (my soul mate and lover for the last 13 years) about these issues in response to a comment from her that I had moved away from those topics of old. Here's what I said (which inspired the writing of this blog entry):

I haven't moved away from the issue, just the attitude toward it that I've evolved out of. I'm still quite fascinated with the differences of the way men and women think, and even with the phenomenon of TSism and even TGism. But - when its all wrapped up in self and longing and angst, I just don't need that part of it anymore. For me, it is now more of an interesting exercise in perception of the universe, two completely different mind operating systems - what a kick! I'm intellectually intrigued, and passionately fascinated. Just save me from the seekers on their personal journeys. Been there, done that, don't need to watch it all over again.

And in another email to her noted:

Yeah, I'm getting a bit cold hearted about it. As you know, there are very few people in the world I want to know anything about and fewer still that I want to be bothered with.

Unless I think they are great, I'm not going to friend them. And if they get all huffy - why should I care?
As John Lenon said, "Just because you like my stuff doesn't mean I owe you anything."

Now, that's no put down on anybody. It's not saying that I'm better than anyone or that anyone's life isn't the most important thing to them. But there's no ethical commitment or contract I enter by being an artist and philosopher that if I publish and share my work I have to drum up some sort of reciprocal interest in my audience. I care enough to document what I see that may be of value to others and to take the time to make it available to the public at large. That is a gift, not an obligation.

And so, as I may, from time to time, add new postings here (and perhaps with increasing frequency), the subjects will be the ones that interest me now, at this point in my life's journey as an artist and scientist. We all wanted the Beatles to stay together and keep on playing the same kind of music forever. But isn't that a selfish wish?

Melanie

Transgender Tax Collectors in Pakistan

2011-04-15T06:31:00.000-07:00

I haven't searched the internet for TG news for well over a decade now, but this showed up on CNN this morning, and it was so off-beat I thought I'd share it with y'all.

Dream Big

2011-04-06T13:16:00.001-07:00

Being Yourself Sucks!

2011-04-05T11:20:00.000-07:00

Everybody tells you to be yourself. Society proclaims that if you just be yourself, everything will work out. We get fed this crap from the moment we're born, as in the Disney animated movie Aladin in which Robin Williams (as the Gene, disguised as a bee) actually tells the unconfident hero, "Bee yourself!"

Why this repetitive brainwashing? Because it is what we want to hear. We want to believe that who or what we are will be celebrated by people everywhere, if we're just honest about ourselves. Now while we all may want to believe that, none of us really do. Perhaps we might at first, but it doesn't take long to rid ourselves of that delusion.

By the time we reach kindergarten (if we're lucky enough to retain our innocence of that long) we discover something called "teasing". And another wonderful social tradition called "bullying" follows closely in its wake.

Teasing and bullying are hurtful, but they aren't unnatural. If they were, they wouldn't have survived so long. Each teaser and bully is just another person who lacks confidences in the value of their selves, and seeks to boost that self-image by making others look less valuable (if you can't raise the bridge, lower the river) or by shifting attention toward someone else so no one will be watching them.

Perfectly natural I say, and hurtful as hell. So we all learn in short order not to reveal who we really are to anybody, least of all ourselves. It doesn't start out that way. It is nothing more than Pavolv's dogs really. We act, others react. We associate the hurt with certain kinds of behavior and avoid that behavior. We look around and see what brought about praise to others and try to copy their behavior, mannerisms, and eventually manners of thought so we can garner the same rewards.

In time, we have created such a shell of falsehoods we can't even tell who we are anymore. That's what the teenage years are all about - "finding yourself", which you wouldn't have to do if you hadn't gone and lost yourself to begin with!

Now if you have a child with a physical or mental "defect" - something real, not just a made up difference amplified by a bully's taunts - well now you've got a real problem. Here's this worthy kid who is NEVER going to be treated kindly (or at least not equally) by his peers because he really isn't equal, which simply means he is not the same as them.

No two of us are completely alike, of course, and normality is just the mean average of everyone's abnormalities, but it truly is a mean average. Slide too far off the top of the bell curve, and you become a target for every bottom-feeding insecure taunter who wants to use you as a ladder rung to claw one more soul closer to the summit.

In paradise, everyone can "be yourself", but not in this world. Fact is, you can only expose parts of yourself in different contexts, and some parts you can never show. But then again, why would you want to? We all have dark thoughts and deep secrets. We're all ashamed of this or that (or at least we should be!)

We can show one face in public, another in private, one to our friends, one to our family and a third to our mate. But there are some faces we can't even show to ourselves. We don't dare, lest the very cogitation of some inner truth may risk knowledge of it slipping out through some cracks we haven't yet figured.

This is the real world. And so, we learn to play different roles. And for some of us when we are 3 or 30 we start to question our part in the Grand Scheme. We go beyond asking ourselves who we really to acknowledge facts about ourselves we wish we not really true.

And in so doing, we grow a pain inside - a feeling of being trapped, limited, constrained by our roles. And we break out, we make changes, we risk frienships and careers, marriages and even perhaps our lives - all to kill the pain of acting as we aren't and not acting as we are: the double-edged sword of insincerity.

When we brave souls (or selfish souls, depending on who wins and who loses as a result of our actions) open up to the world to reveal our inner natures we shoot ourselves in the foot. Why? Because we aren't content to be who we really are - we want to embody the ideal self we've always held inside!

To compensate for the confinements of living a lie, we imagine an alter ego for ourselves: the person we'd like to be. But this Perfect Being or Super Hero is just another fabrication that bears little resemblance to the truth. And yet, it is that shining avatar that provides us with the motivation to break out of the false shell we have been wearing for all those previous years.

Without that false image, we could never muster the courage or determination to risk it all to stop being who we aren't. And that is the key to another door of tragedy. Rather than really trying to be who we are, we go through all the heartache and devastation of ripping off the old skin to try and climb into a new one that is equally false!

It may takes us years or even decades (if we are lucky enough to realize it at all in our lifetimes) to grasp that we have simply exchanged one confining role for another. But by then, we've established a new career, new friends, perhaps even a new mate and family. And even if we see the fallacy of trying to live as our utopian creations, are we really willing to go through all that loss and torment again? How much can life ask of us?

Well, each of us has to answer that question for himself or herself. Who are we really? All differences between ourselves and our shining avatar aren't equally uncomfortable. After all, should we not aspire to become better beings, and is not one of the best ways to do this to practice being the kind of person we'd like to be?

True enough. But be realistic. Go back to the serenity prayer "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, And wisdom to know the difference." Don't just apply this to obstacles in your life, but to assessing your own nature as well.

In the end, all of life is a compromise. There is no black and white; there is no cut and dried. Only by embracing shades of gray and perpetually re-evalutating contexts as we change and grow can we maximize the expression of our natures, minimize our deceptive presentations, and find the best balance between being ourselves and acting in consideration of others.

Bound for California

2011-04-04T21:23:00.000-07:00

I was born in California at the ripe old age of zero. Years later, here I am. The end.

Well, it might have been the end, as I have been stuck here in Oregon for the last 3 1/2 years. Oh, I like Oregon all right - it has the gentlest people on earth. Considerate. Non-judgmental. Boring as hell.

Here in Salem, the capitol of this great state, I think they add thorazine to the water supply.

I always dreamed of living in Oregon. As a child I first became enraptured by the California Gold Rush. So, just before coming to Oregon, I ended up living in Gold Country, about fifteen miles from where gold was first discovered at Sutter's Mill in present day Coloma.

That was boring too. Not when I first got there, mind you. In fact, I cried like a little child when Teresa first brought me to the Sutter Mill site. It was like Mecca - ground zero for that explosive Westward expansion that led to the rise of San Francisco and spawned so many tales of wealth, adventure, and villainy.

Many of those tales were told by the great Mark Twain, who spent time in the same towns I recently frequented, such as Angel's Camp. I even went to see the replacement cabin for the replica of the cabin that Mark Twain and Bret Harte had stayed at, as the original was lost and the replica burned down years ago and had to be substitued for with a replacement replica. Sam Clemons would have liked that.

Teresa and I hunted gold ourselves in them thar hills, and actually found enough to powder your nose with. We still have the sluice box in storage with all the other stuff we haven't been able to fit into our Oregon apartment after moving out of the rented house in Gold Country.

We moved here partly because of financial reasons (we could see the economic writing on the wall right after the big real estate crash - we sold our house in Central California one month before that crash and cashed in big - got twice what we'd paid for it two years earlier!)

After selling, we saw a trending decline in my online business of selling products I've created to help writers write better stories (see my web sites at Dramaticapedia.com and Storymind.com) so we moved up North to Gold Country where things were cheaper. But a couple years later, things were ever rougher financially, so we high-tailed it up here to Oregon where it was cheaper still!

I guess it was a good idea. As a kid, I added a love of the Oregon Trail to my love for the Gold Rush - so much so that I penned a fictional diary about a young child in the Old West as he wrote about his journey across the Great Plains and the wilderness to the rich soiled enchanted land of Oregon. It was a pretty good tale I unravelled - oxen dying along the way, furniture left in the wagon ruts, sickness, but practially dripping in pioneer spirit.

Oregonians feel that way about their state. Here in Salem, the original traditional domed capitol building burned down in the 1930s and was replaced by a monstrosity designed by Frank Llyod Wright, or in this case, Frank Lloyd Wrong. It looks like a big marble birthday cake topped by a single yellow shining candle - a statue of the Golden Pioneer. You can see him from anywhere in town, staring off into the distance as if to say, "There's gotta be a way outta here somewhere...."

I was actually bamboozled into thinking this would be an adventure. After I read every book about the Gold Rush in my elementary school library in sixth grade (and this showed a real interest because priior to that I was to shy to ever go there before - not once) - well after I read those, I read a book called, "On To Oregon!" (The exclamation point in the title is theirs, not mine, and is important for it describes how Oregon was portrayed.)

That is the book that inspired me to write my fictional diary (never realizing that decades later I'd write a real one that was even more fantastic! - exclamation point here is my addition). And so, I've now lived those two lives of seeking fortune (and skulking about the youthful playground of Mr. Twain) and travelling those same trails as the Applegates (and even paced around the mountain camp of the Donner Party and saw the depth of the snow they suffered, as evidenced by the trees that still remain which they had felled for fuel, some 20 feet above the ground, for that is how deep the snow was below their feet).

I've run my fingers through the rich, black soil of the Willamette Valley (as they describe it in the book) - I've found agates and petrified wood on the sand bars along the Willamette River, I've gone nearly six months without seeing the sun once under those perpetually gray and rainy Winter skies (it is raining now) - I've criss-crossed the inner city wilderness lands of Minto Brown Island Park (originally owned by a legistator and a drunkard who were separated by the river - after the flood of the 1860s the channel moved and their lands were joined, much to the dismay of both of them) I've hunted for wild hazelnuts in Santium Park and watched the bicyclists cross the river there on the free ferry, I've been to the very spot in Champoeg where fifty American patriots outvoted the English and French contingents to make Oregon part of the United States, rather than independent or part of Canada - I've eaten at Bob's Red Mill and seen the legendary Bob himself walking the aisles as if he were a real human being, rather than an icon - I've crossed the Cascades to hike along ancient lava flows up to extinct volcanoes, I've had the biggest damn cup of hot chocolate I've ever seen in the Timberline Lodge near the top of Mount Hood, the second most climbed mountain in the world.

Well, I could go on and on, but the point is - though I've done a lot here (all of this and much more, and almost all at Teresa's initiative), I've still found it boring because I'm a California kid. I was born there, grew up there, lived there until I was 48 and spent the last ten years in exile, a long way away from my family and friends.

I go down several times a year to visit them all, especially my kids, but it just ain't enough. And taking a plane makes it seem so very far away, and a train even more, and by car even more than that - a thousand miles (Mark Twin used "a" thousand miles, not "one" thousand miles, and yelled at anyone who tried to edit that) a thousand miles of forest and desert and lakes and mountains, rain and snow, tears and triumph, solitude and society, the old life and the new, a jangled mind and a sense of peaceful calm, here and there, now and then and yet to be. California, here I come.

Mexican Morning

2011-04-04T20:01:00.001-07:00

Back in the 1970s, a lot of the music I wrote was extremely naive and optimistic. These days, while I've kept the optimism, I've lost the naiveté, so my compositions are far more complex, though not necessarily better.

Innocence is pretty hard to maintain in a hard world, and even more difficult (though not impossible) to recover once it is lost. But this song, Mexican Morning, is just one of those simple little tunes with no pretensions of being art that joyfully ambles along, oblivious to any darker issues since there isn't a cloud in the sky.

What's So Wrong with Suicide?

2011-04-03T11:08:00.000-07:00

I once saw a cartoon in M.A.D. magazine where a fellow is standing on a dock watching a dollar bill with wings fly away from him as a symbol of his lost wealth. He ties a ball and chain on his leg and jumps into the sea. On the bottom, he lands next to a treasure chest bursting with gold and jewels. The title of the cartoon was "Look Before You Leap".

That's the inspiration for this song of mine (see video below). I've never truly been suicidal, but like most everyone, I've known severe depression at times. But, it always passes and life gets worth living again. Still, I began to wonder, what happens if you succomb to the darkness and then change your mind after it is too late? Consider this song a cautionary tale.

(I wrote this song decades before transition, back in the early 1970s when I was in my late teens):

Here's the same song as I re-recorded it last year:

Finally, here's the music track only (no voices) from the re-recording. It's a bit monotonous, but it builds nicely and you can hear the string section a lot better. I think it stands by itself pretty well:

Transgender Theme Song

2011-03-30T07:18:00.000-07:00

Is there a soundtrack for transition? As a composer, I thought there was. And so, a number of my pre-transition songs included veiled references to my gender issues long before I admitted them publicly.

Two songs in particular come to mind. First, "Rose's House" (under my stage name of Tarnished Karma) about a peeping Tom losing his identity which has lines like:

I look through her mirror,
and she has no shame.
I try to close my eyes,
but I look the same.

The second song is "Morning Gold". Morning Gold is a name I gave my female alter-ego in this song which is about the notion that maybe it would be better to kill that part of my self, leave it behind, and get on with living as a male.

Years after transition I was all filled up with feminist fury over the way women are emotionally second-classed in American society, as if their opinions really aren't valuable, and even in business men just let them play at being in charge while thinking quite differently about it inside their own minds.

And so, I wrote a song called "Pink Blues" which has some great lines once it gets past the rather slow opening harmonies. The harmonies are there to set a base of a male-sounding barbershop quartet backing a lead voice that is not quite male or female. The main vocals in the middle are designed to sound completely female. Of course, its all me, multi-tracked, but that's part of the message I guess.

Music has always been the most important emotional expression for me, even beyond my writings, such as my transition diary. But, due to my gender issues and being the shy type (in spite of becoming a film director and public speaker on Dramatica story structure theory) I've never enjoyed playing with other musicians. Rather, I just sit at my piano, guitar, or whatever, and record little snatches of song ideas, most of which never get turned into full songs.

All of these have ended up on my personal web site in the Music category, and while they date back to micro cassette recordings from the 1970s, only a handful have ever been fully developed.

Of course, twenty years after transition, I seldom write songs that have anything to do with gender issue, and favor a more rock/ballad, classical, or experimental music. You can watch all my latest "music video compositions" here if you are that much into self abuse!

Well, that is on Melanie's Melodies. I've just been paying a lot of interest to my music lately, and thought I'd share some previously unpublished information about some of my early songs with y'all.

As always, catch me on twitter and facebook.

Melanie

Happy New Year, y'all!

2011-01-01T09:22:00.000-08:00

Just a quick update.... Flew back down to California for Christmas with my Kids and Mary (and a bunch of friends from business, USC and even a movie with Teresa's ex-fiance who's a very good friend of ours). Had a wonderful time. Mindi and Ed (my daughter and her husband) and I took in the Nut Cracker. Strange at 57, but I'd never actually been to a ballet before!

I always wanted to see the Nut Cracker, and this was in the Pasadena Civic Auditorium where years earlier I had attended the premier of a film I edited - the Official Tournament of Roses Parade film. (I had worked for a fellow who had the contract for that production in the past, and that year he hired me to edit the film).

There was a float in that parade by Honda with a working rollercoaster that had a 360 loop in the middle. It really wowed the crowds! But, we had three camera angles on the float so in editing I cut all three together so it looked like the coaster went around the loop three times before continuing on. Well, I knew the Tournament (and my boss) were pretty conservative, so I expected he'd tell me to change it to what it "really" was - just one loop around.

Surprisingly, he was tickled by the cut. He said, "They'll never go for it in the final cut, but it's just too interesting no to show it to them." Well, as you may suspect, the Tournament Film Committe loved it and said to keep it in, even though it wasn't really a "documentary" of the event.

So, back to the Civic Auditorium... We premiered the film there on the big screen in that huge modern theater which was filled with dignitaries and muckety-mucks from the Tournament, from Pasadena Society, and anybody else who could rangle a ticket. In other words, the place was packed.

The film ran to an appreciative crowd, and then the moment approached for the Honda float. I was sitting in the back of the theater to observe the audience's reaction. The coaster approached the loop. It went around once. Around twice. A third time! A roar of confusion, then awe, then boisterous approval grew and exploded from the crowd. It was the highlingt of the evening.

Afterward, the key people in the film and in the Tournament gathered at my boss's house for a premier party, though we (Mary and I) couldn't stay long, as she was pregnant with our first child - but that's another story.

So, back to Christmas in California. Had some great visits with friends, did a little business, saw True Grit at the movies, enjoyed some good meals. On in particular, at P.F.Changs just before the Nutcracker, was particularly memorable. My daughter and I were to meet Ed there at the theater and had 40 minutes before show time and had missed dinner due to a full day of Christmas shopping together. So, we got into the crowded restaurant, got seated in about ten minutes, ordered some wonderful items off the menu which came ten minutes later, ate in ten minutes, and had ten minutes left to get to the theater, which we did in time to meet Ed and see the show.

One sad note - I was to visit some dear friends up in the mountains in Pine Mountain Club at about 6000 feet elevation at the bottom of a "bowl" surrounded by 8,000 foot mountain peaks half way between L.A. and Bakerfield (above Frazier Park near Mount Pinos) - confused yet?

Well, Alan and I had just seen True Grit at the AMC multiplex in Burbank and were on the road to a drug store to pick up some wrapping paper for the presents for our friends and then to drive up to the mountain to see them. Teresa and I have spent Christmas Eve with them for years, staying at their home for a few days, then driving down to see my kids and Mary on Christmas morning. But this year, Teresa couldn't drive down with me, so I took the plane and stayed with Mary and my son in our home in Burbank.

(Alan and Teresa used to live in PMC, and later when Teresa and I got together we also moved to PMC and even bought a home there. The two friends, Bob and Shanon, were not married nor intimately involved, but had lived together as roommates - pretty much a couple without "benfits", as they say - for 18 years.)

As we were closing in on the drug store I got a call on my cell phone - "Melanie? This is Shanon. Bob had a heart attack and died this morning." Silence. "What?!", I stammered. "Bob's dead" (delivered almost matter-of-fact). "You're kidding?!" "Nope." And so began a sad and shocked journey up the mountain to stay overnight with Shanon as planned, but not under the conditions we had expected..

Alan was also always at our Christmas Eves and mornings with Bob and Shanon, so it was a surreal experience to be there at this time of year in sadness. Bob was only fifty, an avid hiker (he had joined us in our back country hike on the John Muir Trail, up and over Donahue Pass at 12,000 feet) and we had shared with him many hikes into the wilderness. In fact, these came to be known as "Bob Hikes" - essentially, go off trail, climb over rocks, struggle through underbrush (better if the snow is three feet deep and it's twenty degrees) and dreturn after nightfall.

But, in addition to being in great shape, he also loved to drink and smoke. I don't think I ever saw him sober in the twelve years I knew him, but he was the nicest, kindest fellow - always optimistic, kind of a cross between John Denver and a California Hippie who never grew up. He'll be greatly missed, but he taught me a lot of lessons about life by the one he lived. Teresa and I are planning a memorial web page for him in the near future, but for now, here's a couple of Bob Links about some of the hikes we've taken:

The Grouse Mountain Expedition - a photo essay

Hiking with Bob #1, #2, #3 - Three ten minute videos of me following Bob on a hike in PMC last Christmas, little realizing it would be our last.

Well, don't want to end on a down note (and I'm trying to write and watch the Rose Parade at the same time) so, here's a few cheery things about the holidays before I sign off...

My daughter and her husband are doing well financially this year and she wanted to get me something special this year. So, she bought me the material item I have most wanted (and drooled over) for the longest time: the Canon SX30IS camera! (Actually, this model is only out a few months, but I was craving the earlier SX20IS for a year - and then they came out with this new and even BETTER model!

Man, was I surprised! Let me bore you with the features I love the most: It has a 35x "wide angle" optical zoom. I see things in wide angle and always favored 28mm and 20mm lenses in my 35mm photography in years past. But when I switched to digital, short of getting a digital SLR with interchangable lenses, there was no way to get wide angle in a camera with a built-in zoom lens. (I like the built-in because of the hiking, which is where I take most of my photographs - it prevents dust and is less to carry). So, having a true wide angle on the zoom is amazing! Also, it shoots HD video! So now I don't have to carry a separate video camera on hikes either. In fact, not only is it the best still camera but also the best video camera I've owned.

(If you are interested, you can see some of my photographs here and some of my videos here - and information about some of my days in the movie biz here).

Christmas morning with family (including my son's fiancee) was wonderful, and then, I did something I'd not done before - I flew back home to Teresa and Oregon on Christmas Day at noon! It was the last flight out of Burbank on Alaska Airlines - only partly filled, and getting through security was a breeze.

Teresa met me at the airport, all dolled up, and then drove us home where she had prepared (from scratch, being the true gourmet cook she is) a Rib Roast, from which we cut generous hand-rubbed Prime Rib portions for each of us, a special baked corn dish made with heavy cream and topped with golden Florentine cheese, an exotic olive medley, black truffle mashed potatoes and followed by pumpkin pie with homemade heavy whipped cream seasoned with cardamom, nutmeg, cinnamon and vanilla.

Since then, I've bought a new computer, a new netbook, and gotten them all set up with different user names for business, personal, etc.

All in all, then, it was a great finish to the year. In 2011 we'll likely be moving back to So. Cal for a few years, as I'm about to begin a government project based on theories I created twenty years ago with some friends. This will also give me the chance to share a lot more time with my kids.

More about that later. And now it's time to watch the end of the parade and then settle in for a nice long day of college football bowl games.

Happy New Year, y'all!

Physical Markers of Transsexuals - Follow-up Comments

2010-10-08T15:28:00.000-07:00

Physical Markers of Transsexuals

2010-10-05T12:19:00.000-07:00

Good Days

2010-10-01T03:08:00.000-07:00

Hey, sorry to have left y'all hanging on my las post some months ago in which I was lamenting the poor status of my familial relationships, career situation and general outlook on life.

In fact, right after that post, every standard by which I measure how satisfactory and fulfilling my life is turned North and improved, almost all at once, and all in big ways.

Here's the gist, and then I have to get back to bed - it's about 3 a.m. and I just flew in this afternoon from a business trip out of state and got in the habit of waking up in the middle of the night to prepare for my presentation.

Okay - family stuff. My son is doing very well at his new job. My daughter is quite busy in her career. My son-in-law is going to be quitting his job to pursue his own company in the next couple of months. My son just got engaged, and I flew down to joing the whole damn family for our annual visit to the L.A. county fair.

Mary is doing well at work and has some optimism for the future again. Teresa is upbeat, her shoulder problems have been largely overcome and she's getting into all kinds of new projects, including starting a business of her own.

As for me, business is up, costs are down and two great new financial boosts are, respectively, certain and almost certain to come my way in the next few months. The first of these is the software I co-developed twenty years ago for story structure. It is about to get its first major upgrade in ten years and that should generate a nice chunk of change. The second is a group of people that want to license the very same software to be applied in other areas for analysis and prediction of trends. That second one might lead to a two-year consulting project with attached royalties as well. And what's best, it allows us to help folks by targeting our software in an area in which we've always felt we could be of service.

So, this ain't no fancy literary blog entry like I usually post - just a quick update since the last entry had been hanging around for a while and I keep getting people sending me email and offering their sympathies for my situation which was only that bad for about as long as it took to write that old entry and then got better.

Okay - so thanks for all the compassionate concern, but y'all can stop worrying 'bout me now, 'kay?

Lament & The Past

2010-07-21T06:29:00.000-07:00

Siting here at 5 a.m. Can't sleep. Worried about finances (low sales on my online business during this recession - had to lay off my son last week after ten years). Miss my kids - I'm in Oregon; they're in California where I started out.

Too overweight, no friends here in Oregon - all candidates bore me. No work here in Oregon - my career is (was) in the film industry - first as a filmmaker, then as a teacher of story. No film here in Oregon worth shit.

We keep talking (Teresa and I - Teresa got up an hour ago, worried about my malaise) about moving to the Eastern side of Oregon, but I keep wondering how the hell that's going to be any better.

For ten years I've been gone from Southern California, and though I hate the place, I miss it. And I miss my friends. And I miss my kids. And I miss my life, and the life I might have had.

That comes home in big ways these days - trying to help me connect with the positive things in my past, Teresa plays some songs by the band "America" for me from You Tube. Makes me happy and sad at the same time. Love the music, but I was mostly alone and lonely only child during those years. Glad to have Teresa.

But the music - so of my own compositions of those years sound a lot like America. Here's a clip from You Tube of one of my original songs I recorded just to keep from forgetting it, way back in the 1970s:

That coulda been a great song - it's got all the riffs and kind of "Simon and Garfunkel" chords. I coulda been a contender....

Music is where I always came in times of sadness or stress - just to play on the guitar or piano - to get my feelings out of my heart. Then I'd write shit like this to get the thoughts out of my head. Pressure has always built up until my head and heart are about to explode and the only pressure valves are these words and that music.

I'm such a frustrated artist. I have this personal web site where I"ve posted almost thirty hours of original music and another thirty hours of my original recordings on philosophy, psychology, and theoretic physics. I've got scores of Ansel Adams-like photographs (another of my stunted hobbies) and you know, only about fifteen people per day bother to stop by. And when they do, they are almost all from the TG community, and all they look at are the categories called "photographs" and "fiction" thinking they are going to get all these queenie pix of me in drag or some such shit, and tg fiction about forced gender change. Nobody stops to listen to my music or hear those recordings I spent many hours converting to mp3, editing, organizing and presenting. How frustrating is that?

What's more, I used to be a filmmaker and now I just teach story structure. Oh, sure, I co-created the best-selling story development in the world some twenty years ago, right smack-dab in the middle of transition, but it isn't enough to support me and my own business teaching story through videos, audio programs and my own software program barely makes up the rest.

Like a frickin' coal miner in a company town, I just keep scraping by, doing this shit work in the dark, never having anyone to play my music for, never having a showing of my photographs. And then I try publishing my diary - HUNDREDS of TG folk read it every month, free online - the most popular TG diary ever - since I first put the beginningns of it up on the web way back in 1994 - the world's first TG support web site - I've had literally millions of hits, and tens of thousands - maybe one hundred thousand people have read my diary from the first entry to the last (all 1200 pages!). But it never made me a dime and I'm too unmotivated and lazy to try and get it published. I did put it up on Amazon.com both as a self-published series of six books and also in Kindle version, but I've never sent it off to publishers, and never gotten it into main-stream print.

Hey - Teresa and I just ahd a long discussion about all this. It's almost 6 a.m. now, the sky is bright and the sun is almost up over the horizon. I usually have breakfast about 10 after a massive cup of coffee - eat late, lose weight. But today, especially after seeing the memorial special on Captain Phil from Deadliest Catch last night - I decided to have breakfast because, @#$% I WANT it!

So there's bacon the stove, shredded wheat soaking up the milk in a bowl with plenty of white sugar, and a piece of rye toast, almost ready to eat. Gotta go turn the bacon - back in a minute. (Oh, and Teresa's gone back to bed after being supportive for an hour).

Okay, I got breakfast sitting around me - on either side of my laptop computer - on the fold-down desk on my grandfather's (may he rest in peace) old upright "secretary" from the 1920's. Now I can eat and write at nearly the same time - certainly in the same place.

Teresa had a different path, during her fifth year after FFS (Feminizing Facial Surgery). She's an externalist so when she needed to get back to her roots, she needed to attend to unfinished business from the past - like building a flyable balsa wood model of an airplane that was destroyed when she was a kid. Me, I'm an internalist and a journey person - so, I'm more interested in getting back into processes I enjoy, like writing this blog entry, than in accomplishing anything specific or attending to old business.

In fact, I'm really tired of the old. I've been dealing with gender crap for a quarter of a century now, and dealing with story structure as a business for twenty years. That coudl be good if I was still interested in centering my life around these things, but my interests grow and evolve. I'll always love writing and playing my own music. I'll always lover writing about life and the universe. And I'll always love taking photographs. But WHAT I write about, WHAT I sing about - that has to change or I feel like a squirrel in a cage, running around in circles.

I don't even like seeing favorite movies more than once, except as rare exceptions. No, I'd rather watch some new awful movie on SyFy Channel Saturday night than re-watch and old classic.

So I'vwe had it, you see. I started out (because of the gender thing) feeling like I wasn't worthy. I liked me but I didn't think others did - they all thought I was strange. And I was! I believed in my talents, but I thought my personality was shit. And it is!

But that's okay now, you see, because now I see myself as some weird cross between Einstein and (and Teresa came up with this comparrison, God help her) Andy Warhol! Yeah - that fits me. I want to feel the freedom to just run my fingers through my hair in the morning and go off to the market or the movies without having to "do myself up." Screw social convention, by God!

I spent so much time trying to please other people, or at least trying to not offend them, and to create a sense of value to them by doing things for them, since I was convinced they'd never like me just for me. And when I finally got over that in the years after my own facial surgery, I found I'd made a whole bunch of people dependent on me for financial and emotional support. So, being an ethical person I couldn't just walk away because I didn't need the validation any more - nope, not ethical. No, I'd have to wean them off my support of them so I could finally move on and spend my days pursuing my artistic expression rather than servicing the financial/emotional machine I originally created to take care of them so they'd like me.

Cereal is eaten. Bacon is crispy and chewy at the same time.

Teresa's got a new business starting up. Actually, an old business reborn. She makes authentic historic reproductions of leather items and hand-sewen historic clothing. Pretty cool, huh? Well, over our twelve years together, most of the time I pretty much supported her. And now she wants to support me - now that her own angst is gone, now that she is getting back to activities she loved in the past and let languish - now that I really need to pursue my own Muse.

So, in the future I may eventually close down my business, even though it's always turned a profit, because I just can't stomach the repetitive day after day routine any more. And Teresa would like nothing better than to free me of that ball and chain by pursuing her own interests, of which this new business is a genuine one.

Six months from now, come the first of the year, I think we'll have moved out of this apartment into a rental home on the East Side of the state. We'll have a back yard again, a garage again for Teresa to use as a workshop, a room for my studio for writing and music, and a fireplace for the two of us to cuddle up next to on snowy winter days.

Six months from now, Teresa will probably be making enough to support us (along with the royalties I get from that first story development software program). And then, finally, I'll be free to live like a pig, eat like a horse, and create like a - well, life whatever it is that creates a lot.

For now, I'll have to content myself with little bouts like this middle of the night rant, and with the occassional session on the keyboard or guitar. And when I do, it will be new stuff - FINALLY - not just the same old words and same old tunes. I'm really tired of having created so much and spending all my time trying to put it up on the web and organize it "in service of others" so they can get to what they need or what they like. Screw that, I say! Let someone knock on my door and ask for some of my old music. Me, I'm only happy when I'm making something new out of nothing, like now.

And you know what? The sun just came up and is shining it's golden light warmly on the side of my face. The birds are calling outside. The last piece of bacon and bite of toast are beckoning to me, as is the day ahead. Time to explore the road ahead.

The Mobius Mind

2010-07-17T22:44:00.000-07:00

I'm going to write a book by this title someday. Or maybe not. Actually, I'd like to have already written it, but am not at all sure I really want to write it.

Regardless, there's a point to the title and to this posting - specifically, a conversation Teresa and I just had....

As you may know, Teresa had that radical Feminizing Facial Surgery in October of 2005 and I followed her lead and had it myself in October 2006 - a year and a week later.

Since then, each of us has gone through a near constant evolution of mental attidude and personal progress (growth? - not for me to determine). It turns out that the personal issues and insights she experienced were the very same ones I would encounter almost exactly a year later, every step of the way (as partially documented in my transition diary).

Now it's possible that this is just a co-incidence or maybe cross-pollination as we live with each other 24/7. But, I suspect it is more. In fact, I'm thinking that this pathway is exemplary of the course one is finally enabled to take after gender angst is finally vanquished (in this case by facial surgery, twenty years after transition and almost twenty years after reassignment surgery).

I'll go farther. I'll bet this is the essential road finally opened to us once we overcome whatever the central life-long angst is that we carry. I'll lay you odds that virtually everyone suffers from a core angst of one form or another. And whatever it is, it controls your life and directs your heart and mind. Everything we think, feel and do is driven and colored by the effort to compensate for that central angst - like a black hole in the center of our personal galaxy.

Metaphysically, spiritually, one might say that the angst we suffer in our lives is the purpose of this life. If you believe in re-incarnation, you might suspect that we keep coming back until we have experienced all the angsts a soul can endure and overcome them all.

Personally, I came up with a concept called Co-Incarnation in which we don't just re-incarnate to the future but to the past as well. In fact, there are no other souls than your own and you either will be or have been everyone who every lived - pehaps every sentient creature that every lived on any world in creation. One soul, experienced a life at a time and collectively comprising the living mind of God who is timeless and lives in the past, present and future simultaneously.

Back to the case at hand, the mobius mind, here's where that comes into play...

Teresa, after nearly five years, has finally reached near the end of her post-facial surgery personal growth - both by her own reporting and through my own observation. And, since I was a year behind her all along, I now find myself catching up to where she is, like an accordian that is slowly closing as I approach the same destination at which she has now arrived.

Of late, I have experienced a certain emptiness - dark, unknowable void sitting right in the heart of me. A year ago, Teresa expressed the same thing. It isn't like the pain of gender angst we previously experienced for all those decades. Rather, it is what is left once gender angst is truly gone.

Let me belabor this a bit...

There was a diminishment of gender angst when I first got up the courage to tell friends and family I was transsexual. But there was so much more inner pain. And that is what drove me into transition, reassignment surgery, cosmetic surgery, and ultimately the radical facial surgery.

What I'm saying is that while the inner pain was sometimes reduced to some degree by each of these major activities, other times it was just re-directed or in remission - until facial surgery. You see, during all that time, aside from a few bouts of normalcy, I pretty much always worried about my past being discovered - ascertained rather, from my appearance, height, or mannerisms. And even I, author of the first ever and best selling program on developing a female voice, even I worried about my voice on bad days - the ones in which it just came out gruff on in which I had waxed lazy for a period of weeks and slipped into some of my old vocal patterns and intonations.

(That's one of the downsides of living with another gender changer - no matter how much you are into your new life, being in a relationship, you are going to talk about your past - share, reminisce - and when you do, it comes sneaking up on you in subliminal little patterns of bygone days. You fall back into behavioral processes and vocal use - not all at once, but gradually, as the weeks wear on. What's worse is if you both work out of the house online - well then there's little outside counter influence from interacting with others and you slowly slip into more and more masculine behavior and voice until you actually start getting noticed as "odd" in the real world.) This kind of backsliding still happens, but after facial surgery, you just come off as a strange woman. It makes you unreadable. But before facial surgery - well, it was enough to tip the balance.

The point here is that it wasn't until facial surgery that either of us was finally, truly no longer suffering gender angst or even the repressed fear of discovery. Doesn't happen all at once, mind you - it takes years: about five years, more or less. (Based not just on us two, but on others we know in the community who've reported to us a similar timeline.)

Okay, so when angst finally starts to fade after FFS, you discover that the more it goes, the more of a hole you have inside where it used to be. Hey, we all know that angst pretty much defines your life while you have it. But what has been written about life after it is gone? What road map is there to coming to terms with the emptiness and purposelessness it leaves behind?

You see, if it were a short-term angst (like a bad financial couple of years) then the area around it is still pliable, and when the angst is gone, the figurative mental tissue is still elastic enough to close up the wound and get back to a normal undistored shape.

But if you've had a lifetime of a particular angst, well by the time you finally get rid of it, the mental fabric around it has calcified - hardened around the irritant. And if you are lucky and persistent enough to remove the abcess, the hole remains and your mind remains distorted.

I don't know yet if it is possible to someday crack that old emotional scar tissue so the wound can truly heal. What I do know is that at the moment, I find the void at my core to be extremely uncomfortable and would very much like to fill it. But how do you do that? With what? Since the hole is where your desires are supposed to be (remember, angst masqueredes as desire - the desire to be female, in this case, - which is really a pseudo desire - actually the proactive side of angst: the angst-driven compulsion to put an end to the pain.

And so, my life (even my happiest times) was not really filled with pleasures but with relief from pain. I interpreted that as joy because I've never actual experienced true joy. You can't - not while angst lives.

Teresa was telling me, over the course of this last year, that she felt the answer lay in getting back to what made her happy as a child or a young person. She started exploring those things that had captivated her in the past (like collecting Hot Wheels cars). She bought a truckload of them over the course of months. And yet, they ultimately sit in storage aside from a few of her favorites which drive around her desk.

From this, and from my own experiences, I've come to the conclusion that it isn't trying to remember or recover what you had - rather, it is trying to discover something you've never known: what you enjoy in and of itself, not just as a mask or dodge to take your mind off or compensate for your angst.

As many of you know, I'm the co-creator of the Dramatica Theory of Story - a system of story structure that sees every story as having a single mind in which characters are just different facets. The Dramatica Theory became the best-selling Dramatica Story Development Software by mapping the psychology of the Story Mind and using it as a structural blueprint for good dramatics.

In developing the theory, we asked ourselves, "If a character is the cause of the problem, why can't he see that and just do something about it?" We realized that people with problems have developed blind spots (like that hardened mental tissue around an angst) that shields it from your view. So, even if you recognize that you are the cause of the problem by figuring that out logically, you still can't see the real issue within yourself that is causing the problem, leaving you frustrated as hell.

Stories are about people trying to figure out if the problem is caused by the situation or someone else in it, or caused by themselve. And in the end, they make a "leap of faith" choosing either to stick to their guns in the hope the problem can be solved outside themselve, or by choosing to change their nature or approach in the hope that if they are the problem, they can solve it by altering themselves.

Life is the same way. We come to a point of truth where we must make a stand, one way or the other. We, in the gender community, either choose to keep it under wraps and from that point forward move away from the fulcrum where we had perhaps our one and ony opportunity to leverage our lives or to give it push over the edge and hope for positive consequences.

Now in stories, people get in these angstful predicaments for one of two reasons: One, they arrive at a perfectly legitimate belief system based on their own personal experiences and then move into new situations where it doesn't apply or, Two the original situation in which they developed their belief system changes and no longer exists, making their responses no longer appropriate.

Well, after all these twenty years since we developed the theory, recent experiences have shown me there are two other reasons a person ends up in a such a pickle: One, you never actually had the chance to establish a belief system or methodology that you suddenly find yourself needing or, Two a situation that never existed before comes up and you don't have anything in your experience to apply to it.

I think transition leads to both of those newly discovered story issues. First, your angst fills a place in your head and heart where life experiences ought to grow. When angst is gone, you simply have nothing to take its place and can't live a normal life. Second, life (especially in this quickly changing world) is constantly evolving. You've spent your whole life focussing on this one issue, so by the time you can finally come up for air and look around, there's nothing familar - nothing you recognize any more. You never updated your cultural indoctrination over the decades and you are now so many operating system versions behind the rest of the world, even those things you did learn about living simply don't apply any more.

And this is where I find myself. But I wouldn't be writing this if I just wanted to complain about it. Heck, I've known most of this for some time now. What makes me write about it now is that I think I actually have a solution - at least something I have some resonable hope is going to get me to where I want to go.

To get there, I need to take a lateral course (and that first half of this sentence is a foreshadowing of the solution itself).

I read a great pirate fiction novel in the 1970 or 80s called "On Stranger Tides." I was a writer/director in the movie biz at the time and always thought it would be a great movie - hoped to make it someday. Well, that never happened, but I just today read that this very book is the inspiration for the next Pirates of the Caribbean movie with Johnny Depp. Cool! But what's more cool is that in recalling the plot of the book, an insight into my own post-angst saga made itslef manifest.

In the book, the pirates are hunting for the fountain of youth. They follow a map and get to where they can see it in the distance. But it is under a spell. The more they walk toward it, the farther away it gets! If they back up, it also gets farther away. What a predicament!

Well, they ultimately figure it out. Only if they walk sideways to it - ninety degrees to a direct path (lateral, as I hinted at in that earlier sentence) - only then will the get closer. So, they walk sideways, then turn and look and they are closer. They walk sideways some more and get closer still. Eventually they get close enough to reach out and grab it, and they are finally there.

It seems counter-intuitive: sideways is the one direction that should never bring you toward something. My partner in creating Dramatica, Chris, once said "Sometimes you have to pull something toward you to make it go away; sometimes you have to push something away to make it come closer." That was great psychology and wonderfully Zen, but it only worked for the first two story issues we worked out about having established a working belief system that is no longer valid.

But, his words of wisdom don't cover the situation where you never established the experience or belief system in the first place. In this newcase an appropriate set of truisms might be, "Sometimes you have to ignore something to make it come closer; sometimes you have to fixate on something else to make the first thing go away."

So, in my life at this time the standard push-pull system won't work. But now I see these two other options. In practical application they are:

One, I can put the Grand Hole in my heart aside for a while and pursue smaller, easily identifiable pleasures and interests. If I do this, in time I may find that this very process has actually started to fill that hole when I wasn't looking - the equivalent of getting closer to the fountain of youth while walking perpendicular to it. I might re-culturally indoctrinate myself, gradually, as I immerse myself in momentary and superficial interests, rather than trying to fill that void by directly trying to stuff something into it.

Two, I can ignore the Grand Hole and in time find that it is gone, having simply slipped off my horizon while I become (in a healthy sense) obsessed with something else.

I think I had a sense of this, in the most gossamer way, when I concluded my six book (two trilogy) transition diary about two years ago. I concluded by saying that the problem can't be solved while you are still trying to solve it. Trying to solve it is part of the problem - a continuation of the problem. In fact, it may be completely solved except for the very act of still trying to solve it. And so, I ended the diary saying that by doing so, problem solved.

Strangely, I wrote near the beginning of the diary, "Give up: you've won!", meaning: if you acheived your purpose, you can (and should) stop fighting for it. Of course, that negates the psychological truth that sometimes when you solve a big problem (or defeat a big foe) you just want to rub its nose in it to make up for all the crap it put you through! But still, after a while you have to stop, as the cliche goes, "beating a dead horse" or as the character "Ripley" is told in the movie "Aliens" (second movie in the series) "Ease off, Ripley, you're just grinding metal."

Most of us take note of the Law of Diminishing Returns and eventually stop flailing away or stop laughing or whatever. But sometimes the hurt (or the joy) leading up to the end was so intense that you just can't let it go. And so, many stay in the gender community all their lives, or relive that big play in high school football even when they are using the walker in their later years.

In my case - I made a break of it with the end of my diary. But, I still came back here to share the occassional insight. Sometimes I felt like a failure for not breaking away completely. Other time I rationalized that it was my responsibility to humanity (specifically the TG community) to not keep my discoveries to myself.

The truth, as they say, is even stranger: I just like it. Plain and simple as that. You see, when you walk away from something long enough, you circumnavigate the globe and run smack dab into it again - this time from the other side.

There's to sides to everything in the Circle of Life: the coming and the going, or vice versa. And yet, when you return to the same place, its changed while you were gone, and you've also been changed by the journey. The tao says "You can't step into the same river twice" and "First there is a mountain, then there isn't, then there is." And even those two phrases are two sides of the same coin or, perhaps, the Yin and Yang of tao.

For me, though, I tend more toward the psyentific approach, finally arriving at The Mobius Mind. What I mean by that title is that when you come full circle, you've also come full spiral: you first pass the same point on the flip side, then you come around again to the same point on the same side, though you just walked a straight line, mentally, emotionally.

Again, in brilliant foreshadowing on my part, one of the last chapters in my diary was called, "Full Spiral"- an embryonic attempt to grasp the first whisps of the concept.

In the end, we pass through the inverse of everything on the way to returningn to the same point but changed by the experience. We spiral endlessly through our lives even while we circle back again and again. And the proof is in this very article. Here I am, once again writing for the trangedner community, but why? Not because of gender angst where I originally started. And not because of "civic duty", which was the inverse position. Rather, I've returned because I enjoy writing these articles. That is the sideways path.

And so, in writing this article, it serves as a model of the subject of the article itself. And in this iterative and recursive manner, I hope to wake up one day and discover that the Grand Hole is either filled or gone (two different things, but perhaps the same from the other side).

On that note, I'll leave you with a poem I wrote many years ago, just after reassingnment surgery:

INVERSE

A poem by Melanie Anne Phillips

If you could look into infinity,
all you'd see is the back of your head.

And if you were living forever,
you'd clearly be nothing but dead.

But if you jump out of the system,
where time is the flip-side of space,

You could be everywhere,
though you'd never been there,
and you'd stare right back into your face.

The Seeking of Peace

2010-07-11T20:40:00.000-07:00

Another seeker of peace recently wrote me a note about his/her life and what the future may hold.

Here is my reply:

Thanks for writing.

I used to get scores of long emails every week. But, as you've probably noticed, I pretty much dropped out of the community about fifteen years ago, and have been completely away from the subject (other than writing about my own occasionaly ongoing insights).

So, I only get an email on the subject every few weeks now, which is quite fine by me. But it also allows me the time to actually read them, as I have read yours, and to reply.

It's funny how each of our lives, even just those of us with gender issues, can be so different and so much alike at the same time. We all have unique details, and yet, each of us (as you say) is seeking peace. In the end, it is that and nothing more. And all the reasons, excuses, justifications and even facts are not important in the final reckoning.

I think the key to finding that peace is to cross all the ground until you understand lay of the land. After you've looked under every rock and peered into every shadow, you come to a point of understanding - understanding who you are, what you are, the nature of the universe, and your place in it.

What makes us the same is that we all must cover the same ground. What makes us different is the path we take to do that.

Each of us faces different obstacles and boons. We all have different talents and debilitites. We all start at our own spot on the playing field and end up in our own unique place. And yet, we can find kinship with those others who have dared to let go of the side of the pool, have learned to swim by almost drowning, and have been tenacious enough and lucky enough to survive long enough to find that ethereal peace, halfway bewteen rain and rainbow.

I suppose, if our spirits are not destined to find it in this life, we'll be round again in some manner or other until we do. But each life, even if peace is not found is still not a waste because progress has been made. Next life, you'll start a bit farther into the game.

In the original movie, War Games, of some years ago, the computer running the nuclear deterent program determines that in nuclear war, the only winning move is not to play. In the seeking of inner peace, the only losing move is not to try.

So congratulations on your journey and on the progress you have made. Keep your eye on the goal and judge your life not on what might have been nor even on what cannot be, but on how you've grown in your enlightenment from where you started to where you find yourself today.

Melanie

Still Second Guessing

2010-06-17T07:22:00.000-07:00

So transition was in 1989, reassignment surgery in 1992, facial surgery (ffs) in 2006, and here I am, after all that time and all that effort, still second guessing the decisions I've made in my life.

For example, back in 1979 a dear aunt died and unexpectedly left me half her house. In her will, she insisted the house be sold, not lived in - my parents got the other half.

In those days, I was in the film industry, working mostly as a film editor on business and documentary films but with dreams of becoming a big time Hollywood director. I'd gotten a good job at a large production company just outside of Hollywood, starting as an assitant cameraman and working my way up in a few months to be doing camera work and also getting my own editing room and being assigned to edit on one of the first "reality TV" programs we were producing for ABC (as I recall) called "Real People".

I was so thrilled! I had finally made it in Hollywood and the only way was up. This was so major cool since I had started making my own films at age 12, way back in 1965. I'd done special effects on a shoe-string, all shot in Super-8, but they were pretty durn good. I even won a "Kodak Teenage Movie Award" for one of my films with was chock-full of animation, stop-motion, and Koyannisquatsi-style speeded-up action and time-lapse.

Movies were my life.

So here I was, employed in Hollywood, married about 3+ years, with my first child on the way. And then the production company lost that series. So, everybody got knocked down the ladder a notch. I'd only had that editing room for less than a month and suddenly it was snatched away! I was devastated.

What's more, my wife had just quit work in preparation for having our child. Therefore, I had to stay on the job because we could barely make it on my income as it was. Worse yet, they didn't have any film work for me in the downsized company, so I ended up being made manager of shipping for the educational films they had produced, spending my days boxing films for schools and taking them to the post office. Oh, and as manager, I had one employee - an impertinent young woman from India who never did what I asked and for some reason refused to bathe.

I was on rock bottom. So, what did I do? I played the sympathy card. I got the principals of the company to allow me to borrow all their film equipment - cameras, dolly, lights - even the production van - every weekend for free so I could shoot my own feature film and get that big break to be the Hollywood Director I always dreamed of being.

I even used my friends at the company to be my cameraman and sound guy. Other friends from USC (University of Southern California) - I had gone to the Cinema department and made all my best friendships there - I got them all involved in the project as well.

Ah, we were full of dreams and enthusiasm in those days! Well, I started the movie, funding it with promises to invest (made by putting the screws to some of the people at work) and also getting $1000 from my Dad (which was a ton of money in those days) and even one other source that was really self-serving of me.

My wife's mother had recently died. She left her $2000 from a life insurance policy - the only money the poor lady ever was able to amass. I pressured my wife to let me take it for the movie, promising to parlay it into a fortune. Well, I eventually paid her back - in 2005, some quarter of a century later. But, God, what a cad I was!

Here's this griefing woman, her mother snatched away at far too young an age, she leaves a gift for her daughter, and I gobble it up to advance my glorious career, robbing my wife of how many special moments as she gradually spent the money on things she could share in her heart with her mother. I repeat... What a cad!

Still, that's not what I'm second guessing.

About that time that dear aunt I mentioned earlier died. And I borrowed the money from my half of the house from my parents to finish the movie. Man, I really believed in that movie and in what it would do for everyone. And, being the charismatic sort, I got them to believe as well.

In fact, everyone got involved. All the actors worked for free (with a promise of money when - not "if", but "when" - it made a fortune in distribution. All the crew worked for the same. I shot about half of it on sets built in my grandparents back yard. And that's another story. I was so young and enthusiastic my grandfather agreed to let me put up the set, never realizing it would take over his beloved garage and the ENTIRE back yard for over a year! And yet, he never complained. And worse, I never appreciated that about him until well after his death. I just felt entitled.

So, anyway, we made the movie, couldn't find distribution, got ripped off a couple of times, and ended up only getting $5,000 back of the $25,000 we'd spent. So, nobody ever got their careers advanced, no one ever got any money, my wife lost her inheritance, my dad his $1000, and so on and so on.

Now, to be fare, my mom made food for the crew at my grandparent's house where she lived with my step-father to take care of the elder folk. And she loved to cook for crowds. She was so proud of me. And she doted on being the Set Mom.

And I think my grandparents were energized and proud to have all these young people around, treating them with respect and involving them in the experience.

I've never asked my wife what she thought - been too afraid to, and still am.

The people that worked on it got to use it as a credit in their resumes, though it was never seen. Everyone got a LOT of experience that probably helped them in their future careers. We all got a lot of memories and a whole bevy of friensdships were made or strengthened into the kind that last for life. So, sometimes war is good, I guess, or at least it is good in some ways, if it weren't for all the bad.

So my second guessing here before dawn this fiine day, is about that money for half the house. What if I had used it to buy a house of my own for my budding family? We lived in apartments and rental homes until 1989 when I inherited another house when my grandparents and mother all died of different causes in that same year. So my family finally had a house, but it was too small and had too many memories, and I had just started transition, and kept borrowing against it until, at the present time the mortgage of this originally free house is now costing my wife $2500/month in mortgage payments. She barely has enough money to buy food.

Oh, I paid for the mortgage for over ten years after I moved out in 1998 (I left - I wanted better things - what an asshole....) But now, business is way slow in the recession and I've had to gradually shift over to her paying for it, which includes all of the money I spent on the surgeries I mentioned at the top of this post.

So, second guessing? Oh, you betcha! What if I had not made the movie and just bought a house for my family? Well, my kids would have had so much more in the way of material possessions. And, we could have gone on far more vacations. And the whole mood of life of our family would have been so improved because we wouldn't have had to live hand to mouth with the fear of going bust constantly over our heads for all those years.

Yeah, I screwed up royally on that one! But, what about the movie? It wouldn't have been made, those friendships would have been lost. And one of those was really important financially as well. You see, after we made the movie, my co-producer friend and I later went on to create Dramatica - a new theory of story that his company turned into story development software for writers. And I still get a sizable royalty from it to this day, twenty years after we first released it. In fact, it's been my principal source of income for all of those twenty years.

I don't think that would have happened if I hadn't made the movie. So, in a sense, since I'm so nuts I've always been pretty much unemployable (one friend at that production company I worked at once told me I'd better have my own business and work for myself because I'd never make it working for anyone else) perhaps it was better, in the long run, to make the movie.

What if I'd just made a short little movie to show off my skills as a director and used the rest to buy a house? Might that have not led to the same friendships and the discovery of Dramatica and that ongoing income without busting my wife's inheritance moment, without dooming my family to constant financial fear and on and on?

And what if I got that house and the mood of the family was more pacific, less internally edgy. Would my relationship have been better with my wife? Might I have not transitioned at all?

Think about this: during those heady years of filmdom, when I was first starting out, I had no transgender thoughts at all. The issues that plagued me when until I got married gradually evaporated by being in a relationship for the first time, building a family, building a career, shooting for the moon.

It wasn't until 1986 that I started getting the old feelings back again. And this was due to not having enough money to rent a big enough house for the family, so everything and everyone was way too crowded. My son was old enough we had to move him to a separate room from the one he shared with our baby daughter.

So, my wife and I had to move out of our bedroom so he could have it. We slept in the living room on a very uncomfortable hand-me-down sleeper couch because we couldn't afford a new one.

What if we had our own home with enough space? What if we still rented but had enough to get a bigger place? What if we even just had enough money for a proper sleeper couch!

It was the bills and the sense of career failure and the crowed conditions that may me turn back to my comfort food of dreams of sex change. The worse things got, the more I indulged until when everyone who raised me, grandparents and mom, died in 1989, I went into transition.

So, the question is:: would I have transitioned anyway, even if I was successful and happier in my life and career? Who the hell knows! Maybe it was on a timer and life experience had nothing to do with it. Or, maybe it was completely avoidable.

Keep in mind the purpose of transition is not to become female, it is to become at peace with onself. Even if I really AM female in my head, and who can really tell for sure (tg folk are probably more of gender mutts with a mix of the two rather than being 100% one way of mind and 100% the other of body), even if I am, might not I still have had a completely satisfying life as a man if I had just bought the damn house instead of making the damn movie:?

Well, there's no way to ever know. But the point is, for all you youngin's out there, no matter how things feel while you are doing them, you're going to spend the rest of your life second-guessing them. The only way to real peace is to accept that, indulge it, get a little zen and say, "What happened, happened" and then move on until it happens again.

It's like catching a cold and sometimes more like the flu. Its uncomfortable, you feel like shit for a while, and eventually it passes and life is all pretty again.

So, enough party games for now. I'm feeling much better thank you. Time to move on until next time.

Transitioning after 60

2010-06-14T22:27:00.000-07:00

Got an email today from a late transitioner:

Dear Melanie,

Thank you so much for the great information that your web site provides. How generous it is of you to share your insights and experiences with your sisters that have not yet come as far as you have. Hopefully you may find time to answer a question for me. There seems to be precious little information regarding transition experience for those of us that have entered our 60's. Sometimes, as you no doubt know, it takes a the better part of a lifetime to overcome fear and rejection. Can you recommend any source or an approach for us old broads?

Thank You,

Cas

Here's my reply:

Hi, Cas. I'm not aware specifically of anything for late transitioners. I guess all I have to offer is that there are two parts to transitioning - the physical changes and coming to grips with it all.

As for the physical changes, though one can never be 20 again (I'm 57), there's nothing to prevent you from enjoying the whole physical experience. Of course, passing is always an issue, but that is more dependent on your natural physical attributes than on age - after all, older men and women start to look a lot more alike than younger ones.

The real issues to late transitioning come from the emotional side. I've known early transitioners, older ones, and I myself was in the middle, starting at age 38. What I can say is that the more memories you have, the more you have to work out. I still haven't got it all figured out. I have a lot of issues about "what might have been" and some guilt regarding my kids and my self-centered approach to everyone during transition and years and years afterward. You need to be self-centered - that's how you get through it all, but then later, you see it and have to come to terms with it.

Plus, the notions of who you really are inside, what mix of male and female (no one is 100% and M2F TS folk are usually about 50/50 but in different recipes. But, they all feel that they are women on the inside and just limited by the physical. As time goes on you realize you are just a mutt of gender parts, physical and emotional and mental and you are never going to be all of one thing or all of the other.

So, though you may get rid of that old gender angst with reassignment surgery, and though you may finally gain complete confidence and a new sense of identity with facial surgery, in the end that is all convenience, social comfort and external. I suspect that no one ever completely comes to term with this, no matter how young you start, but you can become content after about twenty years or so of thinking about it most every day.

Summary - it is better to know what it is really like to have the other physicality rather than wonder up to the end. And, it is better to live in the female role since it is less rigid and allows mutts to be more true to themselves without social conflict, but the inner need to be yourself and also to fit in with everyone else will never be fulfilled since you aren't like everyone else and never will be. Accepting and even enjoying that is the journey of the rest of your post-transition life. It can be fun in the end, but it has a lot of rocks along the way.

For additional people to talk to, try http://beginninglifeforums.com - they have a lot of thoughtful and helpful people.

Melanie

Sympathy for the Weevil

2010-04-13T08:25:00.000-07:00

You know the old saying, "The lesser of two evils"? In the Ridley Scott /Russell Crowe movie, "Master and Commander", there is a scene where Crowe, the captain of a warship in the early 1800s gets the goat of his friend, the ships doctor.

He sees a couple of weevils on the table in some bad bread and asks the doctor to choose between them. The doctor replies they are identical and he, therefore, cannot. But the captain insists, so the doctor examines both carefully. He finally picks one, saying it is more robust and therefore healthier. The captain shouts, "There! I have you! Don't you know you should always pick the lesser of two weevils?!"

The doctors doesn't get the joke at first and that is part of the fun in the scene. The purpose of the scene is for the captain to convey to the doctor in a subtle yet powerful way that the captain must make an unpopular choice that the doctor will certainly be against. Nonetheless, as captain he must choose "the lesser of two weevils.,"

Now what does this have to do with "transgender issues"? I'll tell you! First, notice that I put the words "transgender issues" in quotes. There's a purpose to this. You see, I could supstitute any words in there and post this on any of my blogs - the one on story structure, the one on my music, the one on my photography or the on my political views.

The opening story of the weevil is an analogy to a human truism that might equally apply to any subject. And, all that follows, while EXTREMELY usesful for "transgender issues" is also just as useful for "fill in the blank".

But, if I were to talk about "fill in the blank" in my blog on "fill in the blank", well, depending on what actually falls in those "fill in" spaces, there would be a reaction ranging from disinterest to indignation and a sense of having one's trust violated. Mostly, though, people would just drift away as they came there for one thing and got something else.

Where the rest of this article is going has to do only with Transgender Issues (with no quotes). All I have to do is simply name the subject of the appropriate blog in this paragraph to taylor it to that particular audience and then all that follows can be specific, proving both that some things (like the beginning section) apply equally well to everything and that other things (like all that follows on the Transgender subject) are not only NOT useful but counter-productive in some other venues.

My problem (and from what I hear, the problem for a lot of you as well) is the desire to be all that one is - to be so wholly open about oneself that you can talk about anything with anybody anytime. You know, put down like that in black and white it begins to look inane already. But when you are thinking it, the whole concept seems plausible enough.

Why not tell transgender anecdotes from my transition experience in my articles on story structure in my business? If the clientele doesn't accept that, they are prejudiced, right? Maybe. Or maybe they just wanted to hear about story structure.

And what is prejudice anyway - just one thing? Or is it a matter of degree ranging from "not interested" to "kill you"? Somewhere between the two extremes lie reactions like, "well that's inappropriate" and "that makes me uncomfortable."

The reason I put all the "transgender issues" phrases in quotes above is to illustrate that this problem is not confined only to how others respond to us who have transition. Depending on which kind of material is put in what other context determines the overall reaction, while the life experience of any particular individual in your audience (meaning perhaps also the people in your personal life) determines their specific reaction.

Why would your old buddy Joe want to start having to deal with transgender issues when you transition, when that subject was never part of your relationship BEFORE you transitioned? Unless he's always had a latent interest in the subject, he's going to feel somewhere between surprised and violated already - just by your admission of the truth. But to then try and force feed him information on the subject (ranging from education to inundating him into your personal esperiences) well doesn't that just sound self-centered, inconsiderate, and domineering?

Yet, we all do that when we transition: "Love me, love my abnormality!" (Did I just calls transgenderism abnormal? Of course I did! If it were normal, everybody would be doing it! That's not to say it isn't a medical issue. And, its not to say people who transition should be protected by the law. AND it is NOT to say that everyone on the planet shouldn't learn to be tolerant or that we have a choice in this and yada, yada, yada.

NO, it is NO"t to say any of those things,. Is multiple sclerosis normal? Is leukemia normal? Is deafness normal? But wait - aren't all those things diseases or maladies that ought to be cured? Am I saying that transgendered people need to be cured?

First of all, my daughter is an interpreter for the deaf - its her profession. And she tells me there is a whole segment of the deaf community that is militantly AGAINST being "cured". In fact, she says they don't consider themselves abnormal at all - just a different branch of the species. They state that Beethoven is nobdy to them - what did he ever do of value? Of course, they may forget that Beethoven wrote his last works while completely deaf. But so what? THEY still can't hear it, so if they are normal and don't need to be cured, then Beethoven accomplished nothing of value because music has no value.

Well, that's the militant branch. You'd find a bigger group of non-hearing folk (more PC that "deaf") who see Beethoven as a symbol of tolerance between the hearing and non-hearing worlds. And, you'd find some who appreciate his music - not by hearing it of course, but by the mathematical flow of the relationships of the notes in his symphonies. Music is math, after all, so maybe he was a great mathematical artist, as far as the non-hearing world is concerned. And then there are some "deaf" people who just want to get "cured" and the hell with it.

And doesn't that sound like the Transgender Community as well? There are those who say we are a different species - there are those who say we can spend decades in one role, transition in a year and be "just like any other woman" who never lived as a man or ever had thoughts of becoming one.

I sometimes ask myself, "if transgenderism is normal, then why did I have to have surgery?" But would I have been happy NOT having surgery? Absolutely not! The body I had didn't match the body image in my head, wherever THAT came from! If you need surgery to correct something, how normal can it be?

So, I might compromise here - for all you non-surgical types who are transgendered internally and don't want surgery, well I don't deny that you may have a right to call yourself normal, as just a variation of the species at large. But as for me, who really NEEDED surgery to fix my mental problem, well I was NEVER normal, and aren't now, and never WILL be. So what!

Is a rock star normal? Is an olympic athelete normal? Yes and no, and no and yes. It all depends on what quality you are measuring. We all have the same basic emotions, so we are all normal. But we all have differnt talents and anti-talents, making us not a homogenous human soup but a big bubbling cauldron of differences.

Thing is, not everybody is interested in all those differences. They are interested in just certain subjects. That's another thing that makes us each unique - what do we like, what do we not like, what can we tolerate, what makes us uncomfortable, what makes us incensed.

I'll tell you a true story. Someone called on the phone a couple months ago. She was lamenting that since starting transition a short time ago, she hadn't been able to find work. She was sure if she didn't find a job soon, she was going to be homeless. She was looking for a job paying what she used to make before transition, and wouldn't accept anything less because she had all these qualifications and experience.

I suggested that there were two options, as I saw it. One, accept a low paying job that will accept you at this early stage of transition so you can practice your new role and get comfortable with it. Two, detransition for a while to get a job as a man, dress at home in the evenings and weekends, and build up a war chest for your transition so you can support yourself when you can't get high-paid work while you are initially living full-time.

Either way, I told her, you have a plan that makes sense - a course of action. And each one will get you through, but if you keep trying to get paid like you used to while you look and act like you do at this early stage - hey - who are you fooling!

Then she said, "I keep getting doors slammed in my face just because I'm a woman!" Well, I don't mind a positive attitude but self-deception is where I draw the line. I had to tell her, "No, you don't keep getting doors slammed in your face because you are woman. It is because you look like a man, act like a man, talk like a man, but wear female clothing and call yourself a woman."

That went over as you might expect. You know, I can't help but forget what it felt like to finally be free from the box of living like a man over twenty years ago. How liberating! And how can I possibly remember what it felt like to have to bolster my resolve to be myself by thinking of myself as a woman all the time and, therefore, believing that anybody who didn't treat me like one was prejudice, unsupportive or intolerant?

There's no way I'm ever going to remember what that felt like, so I can't be too hard on the "new woman" from my true story. Still, how can I, after more or less blending into society for all these years, how can I NOT be aware of the other side of the coin as well?

People in transition make almost everyone uncomfortable at best. You can spot 'em a mile away. They look, act, and sound ridiculous. Why would you hire one to be in your face everyday when you could hire someone else almost equally qualified who is pleasant and interesting to work with?

Besides, people in transition are so angst-driven and NEED to be in heavy self-decption just to muster up the balls to face the world every day. That make for a really volatile and self-focused person - not the ideal profile for an employee.

Look, people are people. Like the weevils, everyone is different, yet we are all the same. A weevil is never going to be a butterfly, but it at least might live a long life and eat a lot of bread if it doesn't stand up and wave itself around and shout, "look at me, I'm a weevil!"

And that, dear reader, is why after many attempts to put TG stuff on my other blogs and web sites, I have finally aborted that effort. TG stuff belongs here, not on my story structure web site. And music belongs on my music site, not on my photography site, and so on and so forth.

We all may be multi-faceted, but not everyone is interested, or tolerant in every last one of our facets. We need to be true to ourselves, but also to be mindful of what is true to others. Do we really want to force others into a position of uncomfortablility and when they recoil to accuse them of being bigots? I sure did, when I was in transition. Won't do it now, though - no longer.

You see, the choice is not just which weevil to pick. The weevil has some choices to make as well. Be yourself. Share as many facets as you can with each individual, each group, each social scenario. But also be prepared to konw there is a time and a place in which to expose yourself, and it isn't always in public.

As for me, I'm really tired of having myself completely re-evaluated every time I post a link to some of my TG stuff on my Facebook page, or on Twitter, or on my web sites or blogs. And I'm tired of trying to get writers on my story structure page to like my photography or music.

I figure if I keep each area confined to its own subject, more people will come and be interested because they are not being slapped in the face ftom time to time with subjects in which they are not interested or are even repulsed.

If you went to a resaurant and sat down and they handed you a piece of sheet music instead of a menu, well, what would your reaction be? The occassional person might be overjoyed. Most people would be confused. A number would get up and leave. Nobody would feel they got the meal they came there for.

Also true for someone trying to pass not by becomming passable, but by trying to pass themselves off as a woman when they are obviously still mostly man.

So, the time for choice is here, my friends: compartmentalize yourself or toss yourself willy nilly at everyone in every situation.

My solution? I 'm sticking with one subject per blog or Facebook account - consistency and focus, providing what people are coning there for. But on my personal web page I have links to all my facets - to every blog, subject, or web site in which I have something to say.

Some people may come to know me only as a composer, or only as a photographer; only as a teacher of story structure or only as a transsexual. Anyone who wants or needs to know more can Google my name and find my home page where they can pick and choose what interests them, avoid what doesn't, and most of all learn to have a little sympathy for the weevil.

Sex Change Isn't Worth It - It's Just Inevitable

2010-03-14T10:24:00.000-07:00

No one wants to hear it when they are first starting out, and few will admit it after its all done and over with, but with VERY rare exceptions, changing sex pretty much ruins your life - at least the life you had.

That's not to say that you can't build a new life with lots of positive things in it, but there are always losses, issues, and regrets.

Still, deep inside you feel "normal" for the first time in your life, and you never lose that, even after twenty years.

But, it takes about twenty years after sex change to truly accept yourself. You keep second-guessing yourself, running "what-if" scenarios and trying to save the life that was.

You want it all - a new life as a woman and all the perks of the old life as a man, inclluding business/career success, family and friends, and that subliminal sense of entitlement that all men are born to expect and all woman struggle (mostly in vain) to attain.

Why can't you have it all, you ask yourself - you're entitled! Hog pucky! Nobody's "entitled" to anything. It's just that men are allowed to expect it and women aren't raised that way.

Now imagine that you end up with the perfect outcome to your transition. Say you were married and had kids and a multi-decade career, as a hypothetical example. You imagine that you can still have all that and get through transition too. And for a while it looks like you can. But then you gradually come to realize that even if you hold it all together, nobody really treats you the same anymore - not your wife or your kids or your fellow workers.

In fact, people really don't know how to treat you. Even if you look like a princess, you almost demand to be included in things and treated in authoritative ways that are socially reserved for men. CAN women get such treatment? Sure! But how many actually do, and even more, how many really want to?

Oh, if you're lucky everybody is nice enough, but I gotta tell ya, there's a palpable change in the atmosphere of your relationships with everyone from counter clerks to progeny. There's a shift in the emotional background of your life - your mood theme song has shifted to a different tune and that old comfortable melody just doesn't play anymore.

Niow, this isn't intended to be a downer (though it sure as hell sounds like one so far). Nope. The idea is to help those who are planning to go through this enter the process with eyes open. And for those who've gone through it to know they aren't unique in the sense of loss as well as gain.

Consider - women don't have years of training to live as a man. You do. You're never going to get rid of that. And all the things you were promised as a boy growing up - well you may or may not have actually gotten them in your male life, but they set in place in your mind as life goals that, as a woman, are pretty much impossible to attain (or to retain after transition).

Hey - I'll tell you what I do. I've divided my life into two stories. Story one, everything up until this year. That includes from birth through transition and twenty years after sex reassignment surgery. That story is about my trying to have it all. And in that story, I chided myself daily for moving out of state away from my kids and friends.

And here's the weird part - they all accepted me! I stayed with my wife, Mary, for years after transition. She was happy to have me. I was the one who decided to move out of our bed to a separate room to be more myself. I was the one who dated and had relationships on the side (all with her accepting knowledge) so I could fully experience life as a woman. I even introduced her to dates as my sister and her kids. And I was the one who (though invited to go camping as one of the moms in my daughter's girl scout troop) tried to take charge because I felt entitled (clearly I knew a better way to do things) and I was the one who told my son, "I just can't be dad anymore," as if I was doing him a favor.

Story one is all about my realizing what a self-centered, self-justifying, self-righteous ass I was and they trying to make amends. And how did I try to make up for these things? By seeking to fix all those old relationships on my own terms. After all, to do any less wouldn't be fair to me, would it?

What's story two? That is when I finally realized I can't fix the damage I've done to others. I've slapped their loyalty in the face and trod all over them, cheating my kids out a proper childhood, my wife out of the security she so desired, and myself out of the experiences I didn't have that could now be part of fond memories.

And in story two, I have to say - "I can't fix story one." Story one is either a "wash" if you add up all the negatives and all the positives, or for some people it might just be a big negative.

Like a gambler who keeps throwing good money after bad, you don't want to walk away a loser. So you perpetuate that first story - keep trying to make it up to people, keep trying to bend the course of relationships as they exist today toward a new direction - a new destination - where you can honestly proclaim you have succeeded in life, despite the costs.

But that if fracking impossible. The moment you begin transition you've irrepairably trashed that life. You can salvage bits and pieces if you work hard, are lucky, and if those around you are loyal enough to help you (and if you were good enough to them before transition that you can spend a bit of that emotional bank account now that you need it).

But the life itself is toast - you've thrown all that wass into a big negative context and all that might have been out the window. But you don't want to walk away a loser, so every day you keep trying to fix the unfixable.

And this is the real tragedy of transition - that after you achieve the impossible, you think you can fix anything and waste the rest of the incredible life you've managed to create by believing you can save the life you left behind.

Story two is when you write off story one. No, I don't mean write off friends, family and career. Rather, you say, "That story is over. Time to move one." When you do that, you take stock of how things stand today - what really IS your relationship with wife and kids, right now this very moment. Forget about what it USED to be or what you WISH it could become. What really IS it today, as if you were strarting from scratch.

For story two to begin, you have to end story one. You have to hit the cosmic Reset button. You have to forget about the wins and losses as if your whole previous life was one football game and how you are on to the next.

In this frame of mind, it doesn't really matter if you won or lost in story one - that was last week's game. What matters is that you are just starting story two.

Let me say this one more way to make sure I'm clear: Imagine that somebody else lived the first part of your life and did what they did. Now, their soul is recalled to heaven and you are sent in to take over. You step into the role and everyone thinks you are the same person. But you aren't (how could you be).

And so the first thing you do is take stock of the assets and the liabilities. You look at relationships and see who you like and who you don't and in what ways - and who likes you and who doesn't and how. You see the financial situation you inherited from your predecessor, much like a new president taking over in the white house from a previous administration.

In some ways, you feel like a cad because you are no longer bound by any loyalties or commitments - those were made by that other person, and you are in charge now in story two. They still think you are the same person and expect you to \honor those promises, both logistic and emotional, just as other countries expect the USA to honor its treaties, even if we have a new president.

But you aren't that person and don't feel responsible or obligated to continue policies of the past, no matter how much others have come to depend on them.

So, am I saying you should trash everybody? Far from it! The idea is to say, "Maybe I felt about person X a particular way in the beginning and kept nurturing that relationship for years. But how do I feel about them and our relationship right now, this very moment. What really IS the nature of our true relationship - not the one I had or tried to make or wished for, but what really IS it?

You need to open yourself up to true honestly and clarity when you take stock. And then, if you are like most people, you can cut away all the presumptions and warped perspectives and see things as they truly are and how you really feel about them - not in terms of all your hopes and dreams and the work you put into things but in terms of "what have we done for each other lately."

Take a snapshot of your life as it is (as the person who has stepped into your life as New Management). List up your assets and detriments. Assess each aspect of you life as to whether it is worth maintaining, building, or eliminating. Set new goals based not on what you wanted to achieve for all those years, but on what you'd like to achieve now if you were starting in this life from scratch with no responsibilites, obligations, commitments or rationalizations.

Until you are willing to do that, you can't start story two. Until you are willing to say, "Even if I have been unfair or even awful to others in the past, I don't have to make up for it. Let me see what our actual relationship is right now and determine if I want to put any more into it or not.

Now, more that likely, whatever germs of love and desire to bring joy to other were real and not imagined will still be true today. But the infrastructure you built of costs and dividends - how much you expected and how much you were willing to sacrifice - all that is gone and needs to be reassessed.

So, most likelyl you won't dump anyone or hang them out to dry. But you may really change your idea of what you have to sacrifice for them, and shift instead to building a brand new relationship with them based on the raw truth of how things really stand.

Look - we all hope to change our mates when we marry (at least in all live short of fairy tales). How successful are we? Not at all. People are who they are, and you can't change their nature, only their behavior. And so any uncomfortable alteration that you hammered into place in the past is forced on the relationship from the outside. It isn't real. It is just pretend. It never really existed.

Who IS that person at the core? And who are you this very day - stripped of all your plans and dreams, freed from trying to save things or turn them around.

Like a systems analyst in a hostile take-over, look at your life and determine who to keep, who to can, how to adjust the emotional wages you are willing to pay, what infrastructure has to go, what new infrastructure needs to be brought in, and what infrastructure can be reworked.

Like saving a company, save your life! Allow yourself some happiness free from regrets!

Now, keep in mind that nobody else will see you as somebody new starting over. They will see you as the same old person singing a new tune. So while to you this is a whole new beginning of a whole new story, to them it is a different meloday set to the same old story.

All the years you've known people becomes intertia in the way they feel about you. You may now be free of it, but they aren't. Eveything you do now (from your perspective) is the first step of a new journey. For them, it is just one more drop in a very big bucket.

As long as you try to fix story one, you are trapped by that same inertia of the past, trying to steer your life into a new course while fighting not only other people's gravity to the past but your own as well. When you finally break free into story two, you eliminate all your inertia, but still have theirs to move.

So, don't expect instant results. It will take a lot of time, and a good manager knows that about a company being re-organized. But as long as you aren't bound by those shackles, you can put all your energy into building something new as an ALTERNATIVE to the life you had before - not a remedy for it.

And, in time, people will see a new consistency to the new life structure you are building. They will begin to see the pattern, the shape of things to come. And, in time, they will begin to trust in the new you and join you in a whole new paradigm for your relationships.

After all, now matter how much water has gone under the bridge, everyone has the capacity to say, "That was then, this is now" but first you have to prove it to them.

And so, know that sex change solves only one problem - being comfortable in your own skin. All other problems it makes worse. The only way out is to put an end to trying to maintain what was, see what truly is, and use that as a starting point with a clean slate to build something new that is free from all that happened and all you hoped would be.

My new web site for writers!

2010-02-09T07:47:00.000-08:00

As most of you know, my "day job" for the last 20 years is as a teacher of the craft of creative writing. I just opened a new FREE writing resource web site.

Check it out, if you get the chance....

A frustration

2010-01-12T10:34:00.000-08:00

I'm an artist of sorts. Actually, I think of myself as a "concept artist" (a phrase of my own creation, if that isn't too recursive). That means that I'm interested in coming up with new concepts and sharing them with an audience. I'm NOT so much interested in actually turning these concepts into finished, polished works. To me, once I've got the idea or feeling documented in terms of its nature and potential, the rest is just boring work. And besides, if I take the time to do all the completion work, not ony will I be bored and frustrated to tears but I'll be wasting time I could be spending creating other new concepts, all of which will be forever lost, here and gone, just because I'm trying to look "professional" in my work. Screw that.

Still, as much as I may enjoy my own concept art, it is even more meaningful when I can share it with someone else who tunes in to the notion, grooves on the rythm, or groks the significance and expanse. That's why I put up my personal web site at http://melanieannephillips.com/

It was a lot of work, I'll tell you - I had to listen to, convert, and break apart over 40 hours of audio recordings I've made over the year of various notes about concepts that have come and gone. These range from original music to ideas on story structure, psychology and even physics, due to my work as co-creator of the Dramatica theory of story and the Dramatica software for developing novels and screenplays.

In addiition, as a photographer I've created hundreds of (what I consider) stunning photographs, not to mention the fiction I've written and on and on.

Point here is that I have two primary web sites - http://heartcorps.com/ where I put all my writings and stuff for the transgender community, including this blog. This is the world,s very first transgender web support web site, founded in 1994. I've done a lot of work for that particular audience, and I'm proud of sharing my journey with literally hundreds of thousands of folk, many of whom have written me to tell me how I've saved or changed their lives for the positive.

My other site, http://storymind.com/ is where I make my living with Dramatica and other videos, audios, books and software products like StoryWeaver which I created to help writers fashion better stories with more creative passion.

It's kind of a toss-up as to which area I'm best known in. There was a time, about ten years ago, when you could mention my name to anyone in the TG community in the world and they'd know who I was. That time has passed, and good! Back then, my materials on the web were one of the few sources of serious information and help. But with the advent of social networking and You Tube, help is just a click away and I've really become redundant, which is also good.

So, I thought, let me publish my transition diary (which literally tens of thousands of people have read here on this web site and which you can still get here for free). The diary is over 1200 pages. It spans six separate books covering twenty years. One hundred people are reading it at any given moment.

Yet, when I put it in paperback and listed it on Amazon.com and even linked to from my diary pages I've sold only two copies in two months. Fine validation of my art, eh? Oh, sure, I know if you have something available for free, even if it is just in 110 chapters on a 110 web pages, people won't cough up $19.95 to buy it in a more convenient form. Well, to be honest, you'd have to buy all six books and that would set you back about 100 bucks. Yeah, I know.... Still, as a writer who makes a living teaching writers, and since this is my most passionate of all things I"ve ever written, I have to admit it is still a little disappointing. SIX BOOKS! Do you know how much WORK that is????

Okay, so I thought I'd find a publisher. I looked on Amazon.com and found the most prolific publisher - Seal Press. I sent them a little note about myself, the historic and widely read nature of my diary, and a few samples of my work. They rejected it. The person who wrote the note apparently had no idea who I was. (Quick cut to a movie scene in which a pompus has-been shouts in irritation at some lack of recognition "Do You Have Any Idea Who I Am!!!!")

Yeah, well I'm not all full of myself. Not anymore. I'm just saying the moment has passed and my name and work really don't carry any weight or even any recognition anymore and, therefore, I don't think there's much chance of my getting the diary into standard publication. Yeah, I had dreams of it being a reall "cross-over" piece that would be a book-of-the-month selection and show up on Oprah, open minds, spread a message of tolerance and understand and change the very fabric of the foundations of society world-wide. Perhaps my expectations were a little high? No matter, I believe my time has passed.

No without going into great detail, as this next section is briefly about my work in story structure and this is, after all, a TG web site, I have the same issue there as well. I co-created the Dramatica story theory with my long-time friend Chris Huntley back in 1991. We released the software through his company in 1994 and it took the writing world by storm.

People loved it or hated it but everyone had an opinion. And it sold a lot of copies. After all, it took six engineers and one million dollars of research and development just to get the first version out the door. We advertised in all the major writing magazines - full page full color ads on the inside cover and back page. We were interviewed by CNN and the BBC and WIRED magazine. Heady time, that.

I eventually left the company by mutual agreement since Chris didn't want to continue to develop the theory (which is based on the psychology of story structure) into a more broadly based psychology for personal problem solving and life improvement. I was hoping to draw on my experience and knowledge I had gained from helping those in the TG community, add it to this revolutionary new model of story structure and to create a truly useful, immediately intuitive method for resolving angst and maximizing fulfillment - ultimately lessioning the frustrations in the world, the misunderstandings, and thereby fostering peace and communication across the globe. Again, perhaps a bit ambitious.

But, since 1994 Chris and his company have done virtually nothing to improve or expand Dramatica. They've almost stopped advertising it completely. And all the other projects they've created since then have had pretty much fallen flat after all kinds of time, expense, effort and hoopla.

Since they've let Dramatica languish, naturally my royalties have dropped eac of the last fifteen years to the point that razther than being enough to retire on it is not just a little bonus money from time to time.

I had hoped that Dramatica would also grow to help people, not just to write stories but to live with each other in harmony and to find true happiness. But, there was no support for that effort either.

I've built these two web sites single-handedly over the years - WAY too much work for the return. All I ever wanted was enough money to pay the bills and then I could devote myself to trying to help others in those two communities.

But I've grown tired of working on things that aren't my own interests but just my public service. As I mentioned at the beginning, my own loves are phtography, music, concepts, and travel, spending time with my kids and my friends, going to movies and museums and just plain sitting in Minto-Brown Park and watch the geese by the flooded pond.

Yet none of these things are my frustration - not the one I'm writing about today, anyway. My frustration is my personal web site at http://melanieannphillips.com/. I looked at the stats today and got really frustrated - not by the number of people coming there - that's fine - but by what they were looking at, the pages they visited.

This is the site that is my pressure valve - the place I pour out my creative soul so the grind of the TG and Story web sites and "life's work" doesn't sink me completely. I put up my artwork, my music, my fiction stories, my photography and more - hoping to share the OTHER parts of my life (the parts that bring me my greatest joy).

I don't link to that site from the Storymind.com site - that would interfere with business, and I can't afford that. So I link to the site from the TG site, figuring people who read my diary and my articles to help them with transition might enjoy with me some of these other endeavors.

WRONG! The stats told lthe story. Hundreds of people come by my personal site every month from links on the TG site to my home page. And what do they look at? The most popular page is "photographs" - not because they want to see my pictures of Yosemite but because they're hoping to see pictures of me or other transsexuals that they can do whatever they do with.

Next most popular? My fiction section where I have listed some of my screenplays and short stories in the tradition of Mark Twain and Kurt Vonegut. But why are so many TG folk going there? Because they think it is going to be TG fiction about guys turning into women and such.

Get the idea? By the time we get down to the stuff that's really important to me, my music for example, about twenty people show up to theh page every month and 2 or 3 might listen to one of the hundreds of songs I've written.

Just a handfull of folks care a jot about the heart of my own passion. Understandable though - back when I was in their boat I was just as self-focused. It was that or lose it completely. So I don't begrudge it to them. But as for me, I'm still frustrated in the extreme.

You know, I just can't throw myself into that kind of work - tending TG sites, building Story Structure sites, editing web pages, spell checking, designing software tools.... Hell, I can't even bring myself to send things off to publishers or cull through the mountain of writing I've done to pull together a book on a given subject, such as putting together everything I've ever written about the Main Character or Plot or Act Structure into separate books, even though they might make money and would certainly be useful to people.

Nope - I gotta get out of that game!

So, here's the plan... The last few days I've really wanted to find a way to create my Magnum Opus - to pull together all I know about psychology - the structure and the passion - and to assemble it all in an organized manner that covers the whole shebang and simultaneously guides a novice into and through the material until they have mastered his or her own heart and soul.

But I'm scrapping that project. Just can't find the gumption to grind myself up in yet one more project like that - like the TG site, the Story site, the diary, Dramatica, StoryWeaver, my monthly newsletter, courses on story I taught in college, seminars and so on.

Nope - I just can't bring myself to do it anymore.

And so here's the plan (and hopefully the path to end my frustration)....

1. I'm going to let my web sites just sit as they are. This is their high-water mark and the end of my efforts to expand or improve them.

2. I"m going to pursue whatever interests me for no longer or harder than it remains interesting, whether or not anything is accomplished by that. For example, if I want to stare at a cloud for five minutes, I'll stare at the friggin' cloud.

3. If and when I get a notion that, as an artist, I wish to share, I'll plop it into one of my blogs. No more creating web pages just to show my photographic art. If I take a cool photograph, I'll just post it to a blog - click! - and it will be done and gone.

4. Now there may be a time when I can afford an assistant to organize my work, my web sites, and to properly publish and seek publication for my material. Cool! But I'm not going to do it myself anymore. Maybe some day someone will discover some part of my work and want to use it or refurbish it. Cool! But I'm not going to spend any more time hoping for it or trying to make it happen.

In summary, I'm just plain burned out doing the 90% perspiration and want to focus on the 10% inspiration part - the part I really enjoy. I'm almost 57 and have spent all my life doing what I hate or doing what I love but for the wrong reasons (or at least for unfulfilling reasons). From here on out, my life will be for me and will be used to gently flow through the experiences and creative notions that bring me joy.

Time to put an end to this frustration and let happiness happen.

What do you do after sex change?

2010-01-09T15:35:00.000-08:00

Okay, so you've changed your sex. Now what? Most folks figure they'll just get on with a normal life. Never happens! First of all, you've got a lot of adjustments to make. And for some people, they never look good enought to pass and have to deal with that the rest of their lives, just like someone who is disfigured - no matter where you go you are recognized as different.

Some people can never get used to that. And even for the lucky ones who pass just fine, there's all those memories and "what-ifs" to deal with. You think about the life path you might have taken, you keep reconsidering whether or not this path was right for you, regardless of whether or not you really are transgendered. Even if you are, was this the best choice for happiness for yourself and those loved ones whose lives you have changed forever?

I have a theory. Based on what I've seen it takes one year of coming to terms with being a post-op for every two years you spent in the original gender role, more or less. Until you are on that side of the fence you have no idea just how many unsettled questions and speculations will be rattling around your head.

Here's the skinny - anyone you loved or who loved you before transition, you end up having at least some unavoidable regrets for how you treated them or the life you robbed them of in order to obtain the life you wanted for yourself. Children, parents, wives, friends, extended family - all of them had their lives altered by what you did.

The hardest part is finding a way to accept that. Here's the best I've come up with... You're born with the TG bug. It grows within you. There's no cure. At some point it starts affecting your ability to live an ordinary life in the original gender role. You start going a little crazy, then a lot nuts. In fact, I believe that the physiological pressures of the NON-psyhological state of being transgendered actually drives everyone who has it to mental illness as a symptom.

Just like Alzheimer's which is a pysical condition, the symptoms are primarily mental. TGism changes your thought patterns, your personality, your emotions. And then try adding massive doses of hormones into the mix (ten to 20 times higher than any woman ever had)! No wonder you go nuts.

So not only do you have to deal with the life change itself, but you have to cure yourself of mental illness at the same time. Man, what a burden! And then the guilt of how you affected those around you - even though you had no choice....

Well that's really the key, you see. You had no choice. The TG bug made you do it. And the longer you deny it, the more mentally ill you become, justifying all your self-centered actions and spending of joint resources and denying that money, time and attention to your kids, or wife, or parents or friends.

But since you can't get "cured" from being TG and since you treat those around you worse the longer you don't purue it, you can kind of let yourself off the hook, years later when clarity happens. You simply admit that "If I become female, there will be trouble. If I stay male it will be double." (To paraphrase the old song).

So you hurt for the hurt you caused, and the lost opportunities. But at least you can stop blaming yourself.

That's a lynch pin. It is a key that opens the door to a new train of thought. You carry around with you the chains of all your innocent sins, committed while you were out of your mind from TG poisoning. But when you absolve yourself of guilt, you can start asking yourself how you can make it right?

You might at first think you can't and have to suffer that hurt for what you unknowingly did. This is especially true if you think about all the things you might have done with your children while they were young, but did not, or how you may have interacted with a loved one who has since died.

While it is true you can't do those very things now, you can do different things that mean as much to everyone involved. For example, if I felt guilty about the way I treated my grandfather (and thank goodness I don't, but just as an example) I could do something for the Knights of Columbus, his favorite charity. He was Catholic and even though he is gone, I could make a donation to the group in his name.

You see, ethically, you can't undo a deed done, but you can balance out the Karma. If there is no afterlife, then the pain you have caused is gone and the current good deed just makes you feel better in regard to something the lost loved one cared about. If there IS an afterlife, then, by God, the loved one sees you and your current kindness and it bring equity between you.

And what about kids or wives and such? You can't do all those things you might have. Then again, kids lose their parents all the time, or deal with drunk ones or druggies. So maybe you weren't THAT bad - maybe....

But now, these days - the VERY day you can think of something nice to do for them. And keep all the self-serving aspects out of it. Don't grandstand at thinking of them. Just do or say or share something nice with them.

In a positive way, think of "what's done is done" - write off the past and, since it is a closed book, choose to only dwell on the good memories. It is, after all, you choice as to what you want to focus on. If you think of the good times rather than the bad, it not only makes you feel better but give you more positive energy to share with those very people you want to treat better in the here and now.

By now you should realize that at some point after sex change you find yourself concerned with how you've dealt with people in the past and the desire to interact with them more positively in the future. And suddenly it strikes you that is the same place everyone eventually ends up. It's a matter of ethics and humanity. And in the end, sex change was just your particular path to arrive at that enlightened state of mind where you think of others before you think of yourself.

The Gift of FFS (Feminizing Facial Surgery)

2009-12-17T09:42:00.000-08:00

You know, there's a big difference in what's important to a male to female transsexual who's never gone out and passed as a woman - I mean REALLY passed on a regular basis, and those who have lived the life every day. And there's an even BIGGER difference between any m2f transsexual who's lived the new gender role for decades and a newbie who gets Feminizing Facial Surgery (FFS).

Of these three groups, the first one (who seldom goes out as a woman and never lives like that full time) what's important is not getting caught as being a man in drag. For the second group (the long-term full time transsexual, post-op or not), what's important is being sure to do everything you need to do to NOT get read. You can do it but it requires making sure all the details are attended to.

When you are first starting out, you need to watch side-lighting as it shows recent electrolysis to look like beard shadow because it is raised from the trauma to the skin. Plus, hormones have not yet fully softened your looks, so you really have to be on top of the make-up.

But, as the years pass, so do you. And perhaps for a brief while (several years) you don't much think or worry about it. Yet, it is always in the back of your mind somewhere - the fear of being read. And if you get too little sleep, put on too much weight, or are just frowning a lot from working intensely on the computer, you actually still get funny looks from time to time.

So, being long-term is not so much a given that you won't get read, but simply that you have practiced the routines to make yourself look feminine for so long that they have become a habit you don't even think about.

Now as you age, you find the old routines don't work anymore, so what has become second nature suddenly has to be thought about again. And worse, you can't think of anything to make it work under the conditions of normal aging. That's because the bone structures of the face are different in men and women, and if you lose the prettiness of youth, the game is over.

Feminizing Facial Surgery throws you once and for ALL over to the other side. Your bone structure IS now female. So, you don't have to do a damn thing to look like a woman. What I mean is, you can get fat, get old and not sleep for a week and no one would ever think (consciously or unconsciously) that you used to be a guy (or at least lived as one, discounting the inner self).

And so, what's important to a post FFS person is quite different from what's important to a newbie or a long-term lifer post-op. It takes time (about three years after FFS), but you begin to realize that you've begun to drop your old routines that were orignally designed to make you look more like a woman. Some drop off by themselves simply due to the different way men and women treat you nowadays. Other habits you catch yourself still doing and then realize that it is like some sort of tradition that doesn't have any meaning anymore. You do it without even thinking, but there's no purpose to it. So you have to consciously retrain yourself in those cases to let it go. It is never going to be needed again becasue no matter how you age, you'll never look like a man again.

In other words, what used to be second nature for the long-term gender changer is now first nature for the post FFS alumni.

And that is the gift of FFS - having been made so absolutely identical in face to the attributes common to almost all women that issues of passing or being read become as foreign to you as they would be to a natal female.

Once your mind is free of what (it turns out) were routines that took up huge chunks of your mental space to keep them all running, suddenly there's a whole world of feelings, experiences, hopes and dreams that rush in to fill the vacuum. And life becomes an adventure, rather than a trial - maybe for the first time since you were a pre-teen; maybe for the first time in your life.

Here's some videos of my FFS experience and that of Teresa, my life partner, as well...

About Video 1 below: my facial surgery results. Starts with the before pictures, then goes post-surgery for the first of the healing over a six month period. (Note that a lot of people say I look the same or didn't need it. If you don't see the differeces, look closer. The changes are in milimeters over 8 hours in surgery, slightly shaping bones, removing the forehead,reshaping and replacing, removing the chin, shortening reshaping and replacing, etc.

The fact is, it is a series of VERY SUBTLE differences between the genders. Don't look at this through the eyes of a transsexual. Transsexuals try to see themselves as women (and other tg folk as well) as a means of boosting self confidence. But once you know what to look for - things like the length of the chin compared to the overall face, whether there is any "brow bossing" or not above the eyes, how far the forehead projects out over the eyes when seen from the side, how deep the eys are set in their sockets, and so on - THEN you can see why those who have not had FFS still read subliminally as men to most everyone they meet, even though they look "like" women consciously to others.

When you see the difference, that's that you'll understand the gift of FFS. Sorry to be so zen like, but the energy signatures of male and female faces are on different frequencies, so to speak. Even if you are sending a truly and completely female program over a male frequency, part of the minds of those you encounter will still know, deep inside, that you are broadcasting on the male channel. You don't get read, exactly, but you won't experience how people treat someone who broadcasts on the female channel. In other words, after Facial Surgery, you can be a tomboy, a butch lesbianm, whatever you might want. You could put on a fake mustache and beard and you'd look just as much a woman as Lucille Ball in I Love Lucy when she dons a disguise, or Katherine in Pirates of the Caribbean when she masqueredes as a cabin boy.

See for yourself and look closely:

Now, here's a series of videos from Teresa's FFS - a whole 4 hour documentary we shot, in fact, from the "before" shots as we prepared to leave for San Francisco to six months after. Again, look close, see for yourself, and you will understand.

Part 1 - Introduction - Meet Teresa and Melanie

Part 2 - Meet The Doctor

Part 3 - Hospital Admission & Surgical Prep

Part 4 - Last Interview Before Surgery

Part 5 - The Recovery Room

Part 6 - Recovering in the Hospital

Part 7 - First Steps After Surgery

Part 8 - First Bandages Removed

Part 9 - The Recovery Half-Way House

Part 10 - Four Days Post-Op (1)

Part 11 - Four Days Post-Op (2)

Part 12 - More Bandages Removed on Day 5

Part 13 - Eight Days Post-Op

Part 14 - Final Sutures & Staples Removed

Part 15 - Final Bandages Removed

Part 16 - Eleven Days Post-Op Interview (1)

Part 17 - Eleven Days Post-Op Interview (2)

Part 18 - Eleven Days Post-Op Interview (3)

Part 19 - Three Weeks Post-Op

Part 20 - Four Weeks Post-Op Interview

Part 21 - Three Months Post-Op Interview (1)

Part 22 - Three Months Post-Op Interview (2)

Part 23 - Four Months Post-Op Interview (1)

Part 24 - Four Months Post-Op Interview (2)

Part 25 - Four Months Post-Op Interview (3)

Part 26 - Four Months Post-Op Interview (4)

Part 27 - Six Months Post-Op Interview (1)

Part 28 - Six Months Post-Op Interview (2)

Season of Peace

2009-12-14T13:56:00.000-08:00

You know, I've written articles for the TG community for twenty years now. And all of them sprang from my own efforts to overcome angst and find some personal peace. Along the way, these writings have attracted a rather huge following of kindred souls, each seeking some solace in a frightful world.

Even now I still get at least one email per week from someone who felt compelled to write and tell me how their lives were changed by what I had written, and all because they could relate to my suffering and could embrace the hope of a better future that permeated my work, even in its darkest moments.

Earlier this year I actually found that peace. No, not the temporary fleeting feeling that things will work out okay. In fact, they have already worked out okay. And in this wonderful new state of mind I wonder - will anyone relate to writings based on the joy of living rather than tales of suffering through it?

Let's find out....

Let me tell you about my Christmas season. First of all, to set the scene:

Since 1980 I've worked for myself - mostly in the film business and as a writer and teacher of the craft of writing. The usual case has been to barely squeak by financially, punctuated by times of famine and times of plenty. But of late, even in this recession, my business has begun to build again after all these years. I am not only making enough to get by and to eat out or catch a movie from time to time, but to actually put a little money away to tide me over for after the holidays when sales traditionally drop. So, while I'm not rich by any means or even comfortably secure, things are certainly far better than they have been in many, many years.

Relationship-wise, while I'm still married to Mary, I moved out about a dozen years ago to be with Teresa, my life partner. And yet, Mary and I have the most wonderful friendship. We email all the time, talk on the phone once a week or so, and (as is the family tradition), Teresa and I will be travelling down from Oregon to California to visit Mary and my kids for Christmas. We have one big extended family get together - the feast, the exchanging of Christmas presents and loads of laughter and good cheer. And this year it's even better because everyone is doing well financially, doing well in their various relationships, and we all seem to have put any life-long angsts behind us, gathering in joy rather than longing.

Lifestyle-wise, I work for myself out of my home and support Teresa and myself, so we pretty much pursue out interests on our own time whenever we like. We live in Oregon now and often go for walks in the magnificent wild-wood in the middle of town. Snows here from time to time, and we like that. And, we're only about an hour from Portland, a city of two million, so whenever we get a little tired of our town in the midst of this spectacular farmland with snow capped mountains on the horizon, we can bundle right up to Portland and show in their magnificent mega-malls. Or we can catch an IMAX movie, a major concert, take in a museum or visit the zoo. And in the other direction is Silver Falls state park with eleven waterfalls including three you can walk behind. Plus, the beach is just an hour away. All the beaches in Oregon are state land, so you have total access and can even drive your car onto the sand at various places. Also, there's lots of restaurants both in our town and in Portland. AND the people here are so friendly and coureous. Even the teenagers are like boy scouts from the 1950s. Not at all like the mood and attitude back in California, save for friends and family of course!

I'm happy in my work. I'm rather internationally known as a story guru, and am also finally publishing my TG writings in book form for the first time, rather than just on the internet. We have a nice 42" Plasmas TV (that we got right after Teresa's FFS facial surgery four years ago) and this great reclining LazyBoy couch right in front of it. We live in a brand new all-electric apartment, so new that we are the first tennents ever of this unit. In fact, they built the second half of the complex since we've been here over the last two years. These are spacious 900 sq ft. 2 bed 2 bath units. They don't have that awful "apartment white" color on the walls. And, they are so energy efficient that we only pay $50/month in the summer and $75/month in the winter for the all-electric utilities including heat, stove, lights, and water heater. In fact, we didn't even have to put on our heater at all during the 12 degree cold snap we had a few days ago because the guy downstairs was running his heater and it heated us from the floor up. Pretty cool, huh?

Finally got rid of that old Cell phone that was costing me over $100/month since I was paying for my son as well on a family plan. Bought a cool "prepaid" phone instead. Only $10 a month, more features, newer phone, and it automatically bills my credit card.

This Christmas season, Teresa is in such good spirits that she's been taking us all over in and out of town to shop for Christmas presents, but mostly to be out amongst the people - those happy holiday crowds - giving us many enjoyable times over food in restaurants or over a hot eggnog late and a pecan Cinnabon in the mall.

When we go down for our California visit, we'll be first staying with some friends in the mountain town we moved from four years ago and doing our traditional Christmas Eve celebration in which another close friend comes up, stays the night as well, and then we enjoy Christmas morning all together. Then we drive about another hour to Mary and the kids (son 30, daughter 26 and married) to spend the day and the next as well. Finally, we leave there to go across town and stay with my wealthy college buddy and former business partner and his life partner at their elegant and huge four-story home in the Glendale hills, overlooking the better part of the San Fernando Valley. Finally, it's back home to out kitties and a New Year's prime rib buffet which we have reserved.

One thing you'll notice is that I haven't mentioned anything pertaining to gender, transgender or any of the ilk in this description of my life of peace and joy. That's because there isn't much to say. Oh, I've learned a lot about the whole process and have much to offer when specifically addressing the subject, but those issues are all behind me personally these days. Certainly if they even come up at all, it is more "Well, I'm glad THAT's over", or "Remember when this sort of thing used to be a problem?"

So you may be asking, after twenty years of angstful writings, how have I come to this place? You may wonder out of curiosity or in the hopes of following whatever magical path I discovered that led here.

I'll give you the answer:

It took twenty years! And it took many separate problems to be solved, all of which I used to lump under the single heading of "the transgender issue" and try to deal with them as if they were just one thing. I used to figure that I needed to find that one single key that would resolve all this stuff so I could put it behind me once and for all. As long as I kept that approach it could never be removed. It was only when I could see beyond that central angst to see its many components that I could tackle them.

But that's way too complex for this post. So for now, I'll give you the key points in case you might find them of use in your own life....

1. I had to realize that my fantasy of being female wasn't sexual in nature, though it had elements of that, but was my subconscious telling me it wasn't happy with the body I had.

(Note that I don't say that I was really female inside. How the hell can I possible know that? Maybe, someday, if they have some sort of conclusive MRI scan or DNA test I might be told by a professional that I have a female mind, but short of that it's really all just speculation on my part. It is all circumstantial evidence - I couldn't relate to the other boys. But then again, I couldn't relate to the girls either. I liked some of what the boys did but certainly didn't like a lot of it. Same with the girls. Hey, parts of me like the fem and parts of me like the football. So how can I possibly tell if I think like man or a woman with just some quirky gender issues? I can't. Best I've been able to allow myself, from a purely logical perspective, is that perhaps we're ALL intersexed - every person on the planet. After all, physical features range from the masculine to the feminine across both sexes, as do attitudes, interests, and approaches. But, most men seem to center around certain physical standards, as do most women. And that forms, in statistical terms, a "double bell curve" in which most people are near the center of each sex's characteristics dropping off to a much smaller number of people who are almost all "male" or almost totally "female" and that same small percentage in the middle where you find everything from crossdressers to transsexuals to hermaphrodites. It's really just a big spectrum with some parts of that spectrum more frequented than others. So, whatever I actually may think like, my fantasy of being female was just my subconscious recogizing that I was uncomfortable with anywhere in the male bell curve and would be happier in the female bell curve. Some folks find out they are happier in the middle, either as effeminate men, masculine women or permanent transgender folk with various smatterings of both anatomical sexes and the whole range of gender expressions.)

2. So that's when I started transition. And that's the second point. I had to reach the end of my rope emotionally to start transition. For me, it wasn't much of a drama. I was actually happily married, mostly - maybe a little unfulfilled but certainly not miserable or anything like it. I has a proud father of two great kids, 7 and 3. I was a film director, owned my own business, worked with lots of interesting people, was renting a really nice house with a separate office in the back, wood-burning fireplace, large yard, and so on. Had all kinds of friends in the film biz and a pretty active social life. So what drove me to feel I was at the end of my rope? Well, our landlady decided to kick us out and move in herself. So, after six years there, I went to find another house. I got over ambitious. I picked a rental place up in the hills for twice what I had been previously paying. Why? Because even with all my successes, I was feeling unfulfilled and thought perhaps a bigger, better house would finally make me happy. Well, some folks go on drugs or drink. Some opt for infedelity. Some just get weird and end up on the street. And some, like me, bite off a little bit more than they can chew. So when I couldn't keep up the rent and got six months behind in my credit card payments - when my business started to fail because I lost interest since it wasn't the road to happiness and since I now couldn't even meet my basic financial needs no matter how hard I worked, I decided to begin transition. The first steps were back at the old house where I started mail-order hormones, secretly shaved my legs and such. And then I got the new house since those gender-related shenanigans didn't bring me happiness either - just left even more of a hole in my life. Truth is, I sometimes wonder if my subconscious set me up to fail so I'd finally stop screwing around with trying to find fulfillment in a "normal" life and get on with transition which I had consciously determined was NOT for me. Fact is, I believe a lot of people who are heavily intersexed never go the transsexual route because of circumstance and chance, while some who are barely intersexed at all do the whole shebang including surgery simply because their life situations and unplanned events somehow interceed to trigger transition when other means of happiness might have worked even better. And some poor folks - probably a lot of them - end up having surgery only to find out it really wasn't for them and theat their new breed of problems is even worse than the original ones they replaced, or that the original ones still remain in addition to the new ones. Or, worst of all (though unknown to the victim) true happiness might have existed on another life course but is now permanently unachievable because of the decision to change sex. And finally, my mother died. I started full-time hormone therapy on the day of her funeral. Apparently, my feelings for my mother were enough to hold me back, even though I was slowly going nuts, and her death took away the final road block, or more appropriately, busted the dam through which my life-long fantasies now flowed.

3. I had to have the "courage?" to go public, tell friends and family, be laughed at on the streets, suffer indignities, unsurities, deep depressions, family fights and near insanity and be lucky enough to pop out the other side of surgery sane (relatively), still friends with friends, still family with family, and gainfully employed.

4. I had to learn that I was "playing" at being Melanie as much as I used to play at being Dave. I had to find the real me. I had to leave my family and move far away to find myself - who I was outside of those relationships.

5. And finally, I had to have feminizing facial surgery (FFS). Teresa had it. A year later, bummed out by the fact that she now TOTALLY felt like a woman to me and therefore I felt like a transsexual, I was either going to go into a suicidal depression spiral or take the same path she had and have the surgery myself. Which I did.

6. I had to learn, after surgery, that each of us has a subconscious reaction to others, "sexing" them as male or female based on facial bone structure markers. Kind of like sex is built into the face like architecture and make-up, hair, eyebrows and such are just the paint job. If you cover the washington monument with paint it is still going to "read" as an obelisk, even though on the surface it now looks like an ice cream cone. This is SO important to understand. No matter how well you pass, it doesn't matter. Men and women will still subconsciously treat you as they would a male, even though it never occurs to them that you weren't a natural born female. It just creeps into their emotional interactions with you. And worse, you treat yourself that way. You look in the mirror, the bones of your face tell the truth of your origins, and no amount of make-up is going to fool your own subconscious into seeing a female identity in the mirror. Conversely, after facial surgery, you can't see yourself as male subconsciously anymore. So it is more like a face transplant or a soul transplant or a change in identity. More like having your brain transplanted into a different body. But even after that the echoes of your old feelings hold on for years as do the fears of how other see you. You know, even after twenty years of passing, you still worry about being read - until you have facial surgery. Then, if it is successful and you are one of the lucky ones, that fear fades until two or three years later you suddenly realize one day that it is gone and hasn't been there for ages. After this facial surgery, I couldn't get read EMOTIONALLY by others if I talked in my old Dave voice and showed them pictures of my SRS! Sure, they'd believe it consciously, but could not help but feel about me as a woman.

7. And finally, I had to accept the truth of being a woman, by feel, to all I meet, to my children, and to myself. I always wanted to be a man - but not the way I felt back then when I was physically (mostly) that way. I wanted to be a confident man who knew himself and was comfortable in his own skin and in his life situations. I suppose that's why a lot of us identify with movie stars and successful singers - we live vicariously through them for a span because our own intersexed natures of the population as a whole make us all feel uncomfortable with the limiting roles and subconscious body images we project and we perceive in ourselves.

Which brings me to the conclusion of this whole piece... Just as we identify with celebrities, we also love to see the dirt on them - to show they still must suffer as we do - that they are only human after all. We want our characters to be immortal but our actors to have feet of clay. And in my writing for the TG community I had all kinds of successes over the years in the world at large, but still suffered an angst which oozed out of my words. Success at "being a woman" and being accepted and achieving things - human in my suffering, "just like everyone else."

But now, that suffering is gone. Three years after facial surgery, I'm no longer suffering from issues of personal worth. I not only like myself (as I always have) but now I don't worry about whether others do. I am increasingly successful in business but now I find that is sufficient. I have my family and friends, my love Teresa, my cats, recognition in several fields and most of all peace from the gender issues that plagued me for most of my previous years.

And the question is, can you relate to me now? In the midst of whatever turmoil may ravage your life, can you be inspired to know that the story doesn't have to end in sadness and loss? That even if unrecoverable losses occur, there is still the possibility that new dividends will be achieved that bring more joy into your life than the lost old things could ever possible have?

In short, are you willing to put aside the depression and accept that a Season of Peace waits for you too, if only you have the stamina to keep on keeping on, to get down but never give up, to hold out through everything.

You now know that it is at least possible to get through this, to get over it, to accept it yet not dwell on it, to embrace it even while moving beyond it. These are not contradictions. These are the pillars of the peaceful life. And since I have achieved it, it clearly can be done. And if it can be done, that path is open to you as well.

And so, as I close, I wish for you all a Season of Peace. And I am here to report that as bad as times have felt in the past, the life I have today was not only worth it all, but is more wonderful than I ever could have imagined or ever would have believed had I not experienced myself. There were no such stories, no such claims when I began my journey. Perhaps it is time for one - a true story that has led beyond hope to reality.

My Book, "Boiled in Oil" now on Amazon.com

2009-12-14T10:38:00.000-08:00

Check it out at http://www.amazon.com/Boiled-Oil-transgender-journey-discovery/dp/1449598862 to read the first few pages.

Also available in a Kindle ebook version.

My diary is now on Amazon.com

2009-12-02T08:52:00.000-08:00

Just listed on Amazon.com!

Click on the picture to check it out,

or click on the link below:

http://www.amazon.com/Transgender-Diary-Ever-wonder-change/dp/1449911269/

3 Years after FFS Feminizing Facial Surgery - The Look

2009-12-01T08:57:00.000-08:00

Just a quick note to share a bit about what it is like to be three years past FFS.

I had FFS in October of 2006 and my Life Partner, Teresa, hat it in October of 2005

So, I have a rather unique perspective, being able to talk both about the experience and to observe it as well.

Armed with this information , I'd like to share a few key points and conclusions.

This will be the first in a series of short entries, each dealing with just one aspect of FFS.

In this entry - The look at 3 (and 4) years after FFS.

We had our work done with Dr. Ousterhaut in San Francisco.

The doctor's goal is for you to be woken up by a knock at the door, open it in your robe with you hair uncombed and not to have to worry about being "read".

So as a test, I just snapped these pix right after I got up, in my robe, hair uncombed.

Now I'm almost 57, so I'm no raving beauty (anymore?), but I can tell you that 3 years after FFS - mission accomplished.

That's the best part - never having to worry to the point of not even thinking about it any more.

I'm also about 25 pounds overweight right now, so adjust your assessment of the results accordingly.

Teresa, at 4 years post looks even better. Important - FFS results keep improving SLOWLY for at LEAST 4 years after surgery.

Teresa's become shy, so I won't be posting her current pix. But, if you want to see her whole FFS experience on streaming video from pre-surgery to six months after just visit

http://heartcorps.com/journeys/video/ffs/index.htm

You can also buy the entire 4 hour documentary on DVD for just $29.95 at

http://transgender.stores.yahoo.net/fafesufondvd.html

You can also read my own FFS Diary and see all my pre and post pictures at

http://heartcorps.com/epilog.htm

I"ll be back with more updates on the Post-FFS Experience soon.

Melanie

My First Album now on Amazon.com

2009-11-30T05:37:00.000-08:00

From 1986, just before transition.

Click picture to check it out! http://www.amazon.com/Dichotomy/dp/B002WUNQJS/

My Transition Diary now in paperback!

2009-11-29T14:21:00.000-08:00

You can finally get my transition diary in paperback!

Available for $19.95 at https://www.createspace.com/3411932

Working Weekend

2009-06-27T17:28:00.000-07:00

Ya know, I seem to be posting in this blog (as opposed to my other eleven) most often of all these days. As I've mentioned before, I just feel a lot more free here to express myself. It's the one place that nobody will be offended or put-off if I mention a little something about transgender issues in the course of casual conversation. Feels like this here place is closest to my heart, even though it seldom touches on my art, my science, or any of the other myriad of things in which I engage and about which I ponder.

This blog entry is entitled, "Working Weekend" so I guest I best get on with that - at least as a starting point, and then (more than likely) I'll drift off topic like Andy Rooney on "60 Minutes", as usual.

I'm self-employed. Have been, more or less, since 1980 when I went freelance in the movie biz as a director, editor, writer and producer of everything from low-budget features to educationals, industrials, and even a few local television commercials. In fact, as the first of many side-notes, the first feature film I directed, The Strangeness, is coming out on a 30th anniversay DVD release in August with all kinds of bonus features like audio commentary by myself and my two partners in the project. It was a hoot getting together after all these decades about this old project from our college days.

Point is, I'm self-employed. So, to support my family then, and to support me and Teresa now, I have to keep at the game to some degree, pretty much all the time (especially in this economy).

Since 1991 I've spent most of my time teaching writers how to write better fiction. Sometimes I do seminars or ongoing classes, but mostly I create software to help writers structure their stories and also sell DVDs, books, and audio programs I've created to teach the Elements of Story Structure and the Art of Storytelling.

Now, I'm definitely interested in this topic but not as much as my time spent on it would seem to indicate. In the end, though I love to share what I've learned, it is really just business when done to the degree that's required in order to keep the wolf from the door.

Gets a little thin. Nonetheless, there it is. But it takes a lot of gumption to get myself geared up for the neverending battle.

A couple months ago I got it into my bonnet to post all my recorded archives on the interent as streaming videos, mp3s and such, so I could shake this sense of obligation as custodian for all the philiosphies and understandings I've come up with over the decades and have never shared before.

I'm well along into that now, though there is quite a bit more to go. But, since it doesn't make any money, I have to do it in addition to my work efforts. And truth be told, I don't really like either of those endeavors much.

So here I am on a Saturday, bright blue sky and temperatures around 80, just a week into Summer, and I'm converting to mp3 the soundtrack from a 12 hour video series on story structure I recorded in 1999. No don't that just beat all.

I was watching Garth Brooks on a five DVD set I bought at Wal-mart a couple years ago before we moved from Gold Country in California up here to Salem, Oregon. Never opened it until today. In fact, I haven't felt like watching any of the 300 DVDs we own for some months now.

I'm missing my kids who are back in California. I'm missing my friends who are back in California. I'm loving Oregon and wishing everyone else would quit their jobs and sell their homes and come up here to live near me. Not likely though, I imagine.

But today - well it feels like one of those Sundays (yeah, I know its Saturday, but it feels more like a Sunday). It feels like one of those Sundays in the early Summer in California whan I was a kid - even before my mom remarried when I was seven. (She got divorced when I was one).

We lived at my grandparents' place during those intervening years in a modest home on a quiet residential street. On Sunday afternoons in the early Summer there was a gentle golden color to to light. Often slight breeze would blow in through the open screenless windows and softly rustle the lacey curtains on the two side by side windows on the front of the house in the dining "nook" area we ambitiously referred to as the dining "room".

In those days, I could walk out into the back yard and there were no walls along the property lines. Sure, there were chain link fences in this housing development from the 40s and early 50s (our house was built in 51 I believe). And there were no heavy hedges or eye-blocking plants along the fencs. It seemed so open to a small child. I felt I could look up and down the backyards of the stree (we were in the middle of the block) all the way to forever - to adventures I had not yet lived. (Imagine my surprise if I could see my life today!)

There was such a feeling of peace and that all was right with the world. I had one of those childhoods free of abuse or anger and filled with love and freedom to just be me. (It was only as I spent more time in school that I came to understand that the world isn't as kind a place as that and you have to build a shell and wear a mask, even with friends, even all the time, even to yourself lest you see just how little your life of compromises resembles the real you and to experience a pain to grat on account of it.

Garth is doing "Friends in Low Places" now - my favorite song of his.

Well this Saturday feels like those Sundays from my early childhood. Kinda all Tom Sawyer-ish, without the dangerous parts.

Miss my mom a lot. She's been dead these twenty years now. I've never really cried for her the way you'd think I would. I guess I just don't feel that she's really gone. She just stopped.

And so I think I will too.

God, what a lonely night!

2009-06-22T20:18:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I like to be alone. Sometimes I virtually require it. But not tonight.

Teresa and I went on a hike today to a pond we discovered in the wilds of a nearby park. You trapse through 8 foot high grass along a deer trail for about ten minutes, then cross a wide meadowy area, and then climb down a steep hill covered in thorny blackberry brambles.

Don't ask me - we like this kind of stuff.

Well, anyway, last time when we discovered this pond it was about 500 feet long and a couple hundred feet wide. There were huge fish in it - a couple feet in length, some of 'em, and lots of 'em!

And there was something else in the water - beavers! At least, we thought they were beavers, frolicking in the water like otters. But, after I uploaded a video of it all on You Tube, it turns out they were Nutria. Now that's a beast I'd never hear of in California, but here in Oregon they are well known.

It is kinda like a two foot long rat - a rat's tail, but the head of a squirrel and the body of a beaver. And it likes water.

In California, as I discovered on a web search, they were eradicated in 1973. But in Oregon, Washington, Texas, Florida, Lousiana and such, they prevail. Some love 'em 'cause they're cute. Others see them as vermin.

Point is, when we came back this time, the pond was completely dry! As we discovered once we negotiated the brambles, there was a kind of channel to the Willamette River that fills the pond during the Spring rains and melt-off from the Cascades. When the river falls, the channel is blocked and the pond is land locked.

The fish swim in during the high water, get stuck and then follow the pond down during the four weeks it takes for that huge body of water to completely vanish.

So, once we got onto the pond bed, there were no Nutria to be seen. But after topping a low hill that used to be an island, we found the fish. Scores of them, lying dead on their sides in various stages of decay.

And as we approached, but buzzards took to the air. There were about a dozen of them, having their annual feast. Some fish were just bones and a head. Others were fully plump and untouched, still half submerged in the last puddles, but all dead.

I'm glad we were that late because if I had found them when they were dying I would have felt obligated to try and save them, and I don't need that kind of job right now. Why? Because it is a lousy night to be lonely.

I felt REALLY lonely on Father's Day. In fact, I had to call my son to tell him I was going to make it easy for him to wish me a happy Father's Day. That was after six O'clock at night. He wasn't even going to call.

Now, y'all know he works for me doing my shipping, and I live about 1,000 miles away from him to the North. He was always kind of a hermit. So I wasn't feeling lonely and sad because he didn't call. I was feeling crappy because I have this clarity now.

It's been building, and yesterday, Father's Day, I woke up with a big dose of it that hasn't left me since.

You know that song by the "Who" that says, "I can see for miles and miles"? Well now I can.

I see how I was so self-focused in my career, and then self-focused in my transition that it was all about me. Oh, sure, I showed up for every school play, took my kids to beaches and museums, hung a little present for them on the shelves in the living room at Christmas time every night when I had to work late and couldn't see them before bed.

Thought I was the greatest Dad ever! But that was just more of my own egocentric self - coming from the head, not the heart, full of self-righteousness, so sure of the correctness and fairness of my actions on behalf of others that I never stopped to listen to what they were trying to tell me.

I always gave presents at holidays that I wanted people to have - what I thought they should have - not what they really wanted. Sure, the presents were in the categories they enjoyed, but weren't the things they wanted.

And most of all, they wanted me, for some inexplicable reason. God, when I left Mary she said, "you have to do what you have to do" and I took it as cold and unfeeling. In fact, she must have been torn to pieces inside when I left after all I had put her through with transition. And what she was saying was she still didn't hold it against me.

And I f**king took it as coldness.

THAT's what I'm talkin' about!

I've been that way all my life. Probably learned from my mom, God rest her soul.

So now, rather than a lifetime of memories of just holding my kids, playing board games with them, taking Mary to her favorite places - instead of that I've got a head full of memories of me pressuring and cajoling others to follow my lead, go to my places, get my love on my terms only - and I've got an empty heart full of regret, if that isn't a contraditction of terms.

So togight Teresa is feeling under the weather and has gone into the bedroom to sleep it off. I'm alone in the living room.

I called my step dad yesterday and his mind is going. And they've got him on some sort of pills he didn't want and they insisted and now he can't even remember where he lives. Damn! And I hardly ever visited him.

Sure I held some grudges about him not being forceful enough to insist my mom go to the hospital when she took sick and then died. But, of course, I didn't insist either. But that's okay, right? After all, I'm a girl at heart and don't have that kind of assertiveness. Bulls**t!

Just more of my self justifications. Mom needed me and I wasn't there for her. She died. My dad must've been heartbroken and there I was actually telling him I thought it was his fault and that I didn't respect him - him, the man who stayed up all night to finish a homework assignment for me - him, who became scoutmaster for two years so I could have a troop to go camping with. What a bastard. (Bitch now, of course!)

Seems I'm not heard anybody, projected my own interpretation of their actions and their intent.

So why my daughter still thinks to send me flowers on Father's Day and write a loving note and taleks to me several times a day on email - well it just eludes me. And Mary sent me a gift certificate for Amazon.com. Me, who left her, moved 1,000 miles away and ran up our debt on the equity line for all my surgeries over the years that she's now paying on her own because my credit is so crappy due to chasing toys that she had to take the re-fi loan out in her name and her liability only.

What a creep I am!

So, as I sit here lonely and full of self-ridicule and regret, I thought I'd call my daugter since it is Monday and she works 12 hour from 9 to 9. But no email came in today. And me email to her went unanswered. And her cell phone just goes to message.

And I emailed Mary and haven't gotten a reply. And I emailed our friend Alan (Teresa's former fiance - Yeah, I did that too....) He and I are the best of friends. He spends he full two weeks of vacation each year visiting us, 1,000 miles away from his home, one week two times a year. But he didn't respond to his email either.

And my dad's cell phone just goes to message. And my words just go out in this blog. And the recorded program on my DVR is doing the only talking in the room, save for the two remaining cats we have whom I'm ignoring their desire for companionship in order to write this, just like I ignore eveyone else. And I think of the two cats we lost and how many times I ignored their innocent overtures to pet and snuggle.

Yeah, the sun is just going down. Last rays disappeared a few minutes ago. The sky will be full dark in a little over an hour. And I'll be here. All alone. Separated from all those I should have been so closely tied to, save for my poor Teresa feeling ill and sleeping in the other room.

God, what a lonely night!

Father's Day for the Transsexual

2009-06-21T09:09:00.000-07:00

Just a guick note. Thought it might be worthwhile to write something about Father's Day, 20 years after transition.

Well here's the scoop. My daughter sent me fresh Sunflowers (my favorite flower) by special delivery from California (I live in Oregon now). The arrived on Friday (py phone she told me they don't deliver on Saturday or Sunday).

I always had a dream of a an older- style, 1880's house with a white picket fence around a flower garden that featured sunflowers. Well, I've owned a couple of homes, but none like that. And due to the modern age of the houses and the cultural environment, such a garden wasn't practical.

Here I am in Oregon, living in a modern apartment, but my daugter remembered my favorite flower and thought enough to send it along. With a note:

"I love you very much, my Mel. Thank you so much for all your support over the years. I have so many wonderful memories of us together and look forward to creating many more."

Well that sure warmed my heart a bunch. As long as the flowers last, I've got that white picket fenced garden in my heart - bless her soul.

Now, my son... Well, he's a typical 30 year old man. He doesn't express his feelings well, though he is quite a wit in terms of expressing humor. Even as a child he was a bit of the hermit, as we tried to get him into little league and soccer and karate and sea scouts, but he never lasted long, losing interest, mostly in the social aspects.

We paid for him to attend an automotive school in Laramie, Wyoming after high school, but he was the loner there as well and didn't have a very good time. Even when he was called up cold and asked to work for Mercedes Benz in Beverly Hills just weeks after finishing his studies, he found the environment lonely and felt isolated.

Since then, almost for ten years now, he's worked for me, handling all my manufacturing and shipping out of the home where he lives with his mom in California.

He's got a great character - caring to the point of hurting when others are having a bad time of it. Sharp as a tack. And without a mean bone in his body. He calls me every couple of weeks with some exciting thing that happened, sends me emails with links to things that please him, and since we do business together, we're going back and forth with email and the occassional business phone call all the time.

Being the no-nonsense kinda guy he is, he prefers to send gift cards, and has made that his mark with everyone for the last five years or so. Haven't gotten one from him yet, but expect I might, since he usually sends an Amazon.com certificate.

Mary, my wife, sent me a $25 Amazon certificate just this morning. She also hates to shop for just the right gift, which is (I guess) where my son gets it from. But isn't it wonderful that though we haven't lived together for about eleven years now, we're still married and she thinks enough to send anything at all? In fact, she often sends cards, very sweet ones, with the warmest greetings for both myself and Teresa with whom I'v lived for the last decade.

Now Teresa is a bit uncomfortable about Father's Day. First of all, she didn't have kids before transition and always has felt deprived of a true parental experience. When we were living in CA when we first got together, I tried to involve here in the raising of my kids so she could have some of that feeling.

She's been very well treated by Mary and the kids, who give her presents at Christmas (in fact we often go down to CA and share Christmas together). My daughter corresponds with Teresa by email all the time.

But, Teresa's always felt a little uncomfortable with being a pseudo-parent - especialy one who "took their father away", though we all know I was already preparing to move out when I met her. But that's another story.

Teresa is also a bit gun-shy of the holiday as she and her father have only spoken by phone since her surgery back in the late 1980's. As a result, she was unsure of whether to even wish me a happy father's day until I brought up the subject a bit earlier.

My own dads - I've got two - are on better terms. My step-dad lives in a convalescent home in California. He had a minor stroke a few years back and has a few minor disabilities that make it easier for him to live there than on his own. He also was never a very good money maker, so he really doesn't have the funds to live on his own anyway.

When he had his stroke, I came to see him in the hospital every day until he was out of danger and able to look after himself and move into a recovery home. Since my transition, he's never called me by my new name and still refers to me as "he". So, when I get his calls on my birthday or Christmas, it's "Hi, David!"

He does this not out of meanness, but out of love. He is a born again evangelical Christian, and considers what I have done an abomination. BUT - he is NOT a hypocrate. In fact, he believes so strongly that the Lord loves everyone and that it is not our place to be judmental that he warmly greets me with genuine affection, enjoys our rare phone conversations, and also enjoys our even more rare visits.

Last visit I went to see him with my daughter and her (at that time) fiance. They have since married. At that visit, he stepped around calling me "he" or David because I have healed by then from my FFS (facial feminiation surgery) and if he had used the wrong pronoun, people would think we has having another stroke.

My step-dad never kept close contact with my kids or Mary, and left right after my mom's death to spend a couple years in Israel, following his Christian heart. But the kids have always resented his lack of initiative with them, Mary has pretty much disowned him (as well as my son) but my daughter did come to that last visit.

She invited him to her wedding last March and even offered to assign someone to provide him transportation, but he declined to attend with no reason given. I'm not sure if she will be keeping a plate that emotional table for him any longer after that.

My natural father, he lives up in Washington state now (after being in San Diego for most of my adult life until about five years ago. He's almost 83 and still runs a mile three days a week. In fact, as was always the case with him, I still can't keep up with him walking up hills or flights of stairs, and I'm just 56. ("Just"? When did that happen?)

He and I are on much better terms. Teresa and I visit every three months or so and stay at his house. Since I moved up here a couple years ago, I've finally seen my half-brothers and half-sisters a number of times. In fact, my dad and one sister and her husband flew all the way down to CA for my daughter's wedding. We all sat at the same table together. ( I also danced with my father for the first time, as well as with Mary). Teresa couldn't attend due to an injury, but if she had been there the oddness of it all would have been complete - My daughter, her new husband, her dad who changed sex, "her" wife Mary, her son, and then the dancing.

In fact, my daughter wanted me to be with her in the bridal cloister to help her get ready (along with all the bridesmaids) and then wanted me to walk her down the aisle! Bless her heart. So, I did both those things and then danced with my dad, my wife, and my daughter in the father-daughter dance in which no one else was on the dance floor and the two of us slow danced, smiling into each other's eyes to the music of "Sunrise, Sunset" (the wedding song from "Fiddler on the Roof".

Well, I'll be calling my dads a little later. Right now, I'm just waiting for my hair to dry from showering, then I'm taking myself out to breakfast at IHOP for Father's Day.

In invited Teresa, but with her mixed feelings about the day and the fact that she is uncomfortable around crowds to the extent that she has had panic attacks in the past, she won't be joining me.

Later, if the weather holds, she'll be joining me for a nice walk up at Silver Falls (a state park that has eleven wateralls, three of which you can walk behing). I'm also going to buy some new tennis shoes, since one of these has a split in the sole. I'll be cleaning out the car - haven't done that in too long and going to pick up our hormone prescriptions at the pharmacy (we're both out at the same time this very day!).

Now, doesn't that all sound like a fine Father's Day for the Transsexual?

Relevance

2009-06-15T22:52:00.000-07:00

How old are you? Yeah, I mean you, the reader. I'm 56. I was relevant once.

A couple of ages ago I was a pioneer in the online TG community. And in those days I was also a pioneer in creating a whole new theory of story structure and a whole new model of psychology.

But that was ages ago.

Of late, I've found myself struggling to find motivation - because I have no purpose - because there is no meaning - because I'm not relevant.

I've been having a lot of dreams lately - dreams of people I love, past and present, both living and gone.

These dreams are unlike any others I've ever had. They take place in different familiar (though not real) locations, in which events that never happened seem like the stuff of memory. Their whole reason for being seems to bring to the surface ancient feelings I've not experienced in decades - some not since being a small child.

You know the mind has two halves and four parts. The halves are intellect and passion. And each is divided into two - intellect is made up of logic and reason, passion is comprised of feeling and emotion.

Logic is the process, reason the result. Many paths of logic combine to create what we see as reasonable. Feelings are the individual passionate experiences we have, emotion is the sum total of them all. Many distinct feelings, like colors on an artist's palatte, blend and combine to form the emotional backdrop of our self-awareness.

In my dreams, as more and more frequently in my waking hours as well, something will trigger a feeling I haven't had for many many years. Like methane gas trapped under water in the soil since the last ice age, they slowly rise to the surface and burst once more, each like a unique frangrance not sniffed in eons. Together, they create an amotional scent.

But unlike the mood they originally formed so long in the past, my rare feelings now form a great cloud of sadness. It is an odd experience to have each feeling memory be a pleasant one yet their collective smell is acrid and hurtful.

I've been wondering how this could be for a few days now. Today the haze was lifted and my answer became clear.

Back in the day I was a child in a family. There was only my mom and step-dad on a daily basis, but we visited my grandparents on my mom's side several times a week. And my natural father visited me nearly every Saturday. Then there were aunts and uncles, one set right in the same town (my grandmother's sister and her husband) - my mom was an only child as well - and some more distant one's on my grandfather's side elsewhere in the state.

Though I seldom had many friends, there was cub scouting and boy scouting and later college and my new friends at USC cinema. I got married, had two kids of my own, and was involved in both my son's Indian Guide experience as the tribal chief, and also as his Webelos Leader when he arrived that far through his own cub scout experience.

That was just before transition, back in 1989. At that time I had directed two low-budget feature length movies and scores of big budget industrials and educational films, also working as a writer, editor, and producer as well.

To the point, I also had a network of business acquaintances and associates with whom I came together on one project or another from time to time.

Those were days of hope - a career, a family, a gathering of friends. And then I went into transition and it all dissolved.

Here's how it happened. I wasn't getting on in my career as well as I had hoped. Couldn't break into the "movie industry" making entertainment films. I had financial problems - six months behind in my credit cards. My mom had fallen on hard emotional times taking care of my grandmother who had a series of strokes. My mom and step-dad lost the business they had bought with money inherited from one of my aunts who died. (Another aunt had died years earlier and left me half her house after it was sold. I used the money to make one of those feature movies and never got any of it back).

In short, my dreams were starting to falter, my hopes shrivelling. So in 1986 I started exploring gender change. Then, in 1989, my mom died, then my grandfather died, then my grandmother died. We got kicked out of our rented house and moved into the house I inherited - a tiny place I grew up in.

Day after my mom's funeral I started hormone therapy and never looked back.

I worked REALLY hard to keep all my friends, my family and my career. And I was successful. And then I threw it all away - not in a moment, but over the last twenty years.

When I went into transition it hurt my kids in ways I couldn't have imagined and probably still don't know. My son works for me handling the shipping of all my products, my duaughter and I talk on the phone all the time. My wife is still very cheerful with me on the phone and we send each other cards and are still married, even though I've lived with Teresa for the last 11 years.

But what I lost was that wonderful fabric of family and friends - the social network that I enjoyed as a child and was on the way to creating as an adult. I remember us all getting together when I was small on Summer evenings. I'd swim in my little inflatable pool, my mom, grandma and aunt would chat together in the cool of the darkening sky, and my grandfather and uncle would drink Coors as they sat in their wooden lawn chairs in the back yard.

I've got movies. Trying to get enought money to transfer them to DVD. I did transfer all my own videos of my own kids that I had taken on old VHS tape. And of late I've been scanning and posting all kinds of pictures of them when they (and I) were young.

What I've lost is that I slowly pulled away from them all. First I was self-focused in my transition. Then I started dating even while living with my wife and kids. Then I moved out with Teresa. First an apartment in the same town, then 2 hours away in the mountains, then six hours away at the other end of the state, now out of state to the town I'm currently in - 1,000 miles away.

Oh, I'm still on friendly terms with them all, family and friends included, but we don't see each other every day anymore or even every week or month. I go down two or three times a year. Friends are still friends, but I don't get to drop by any more to see what's going on or invite them to barbeques. I'm kinda retired too, so I don't have any business relationships any more either.

Plus, Teresa and I haven't made any friends in any of the places we've lived in the last 11 years. Well, maybe one or two that we see every few months, but nothing on a regular basis.

And so, these feelings from my past that rise to the surface carry the same sweet flavor they did when I last experienced them in a tightly woven social fabric. But now, they almost taunt me with the striking contrast of the isolation in which I now live. And my overall emotional mood goes sour. I embrace the feelings, craving those tastes, but they turn bitter in my mind's mouth as they are just thawed out experiences from the past, not freshly harvested ones from my present.

From this pain I realize that it was the other souls in my life in which my life had meaning. And without them, there is no meaning. Without meaning is no purpose. And without purpose there is no motivation. Which brings us back to square one. The only difference is that now I know why I have no drive to post or teach or strive or build. And it leaves me feeling superfluous and completely without relevance.

You know what I like about this blog?

2009-06-14T09:34:00.001-07:00

I can talk about anything. You see, I'm into a lot of stuff - I direct movies, I compose music, I run a HUGE business based on teaching story structure. I've got my kids, my wife, my life partner, my friends and associates. I'm open on my web site, live my life effectively in stealth, since no one ever asks (don't ask, don't tell?), hike the backcountry of Yosemite for a week at a time, and on and on. (Check out my personal web site at melanieannephillips.com to see the complete list).

But out of all those activities, and all those places I interact and/or post information, there's only one place I can talk about anything, and it's right here.

You see, nobody's offended by hikiing. Nobody's put off by my music complsing (though they might not like my style). But there are still a lot of people who are uncomfortable with my history as a transsexual.

Like most folks in the community, I used to think that was their problem - take me or leave me - YOU work it out! But now, twenty years later, I've come to feel that I don't want that sort of thing getting in the way of someones enjoyment of my photography or their ability to connect with my classes on story structure.

The answer for me isn't to go stealth as so many others do. No. Tried that - didn't like it. I always felt like I was lying and could never get close to people lest I blow my cover. The answer for me isn't black and white - this or that, but more gray-scale.

Simply, I have a main web site that links to everything. But there's no more reason to talk about my gender background on my story structure web site then there is to talk about my hiking on my music web site - it just isn't part of the subject.

But it goes beyond that. Again, simply put - why in the world woud I want to constantly beat myself up by insisting on shoving my transgendered nature in people's faces as a requirement for them to enjoy any of many other things I create and document?

I mean, that's just being masocistic - cutting my own throat (er, sado-masocistic?) Sure, I could be an "in your face" sex change poster child, but why would I want that?

As an artist, I want to share my art - to have it appreciated as I appreciate it. You see, when I create something it is because I have a notion or an experience that I find unique and or memorable. I get excited about it. I want to share it. I want to connect with my fellow human beings so that they get to enjoy the exact same notion or experience just as I thought or felt it.

It's a present - a gift to others. And my reward is the joy I feel when they enjoy that gift - AND the connection I feel at knowing that my singular experience is now shared. I know some people are loners, hermits, or even anti-social. But me, I enjoy watching a movie in a theater ten times more than watching it at home, even on the big screen.

Teresa, my life partner, feels just the opposite. For her, crowds are unpleasant. She hates traffic and noise and distraction and interaction (though she is very good at it to be point of being charismatic). She used to live in a small town on a peninsula in Alaska next to a glacier, just to get away from the cities of the lower 48.

Yet, she also posts all kinds of things on the internet. Mostly about the television show, "Lost" in which she has become. She obsesses on it, pours over freeze frames looking for clues, then gathers together photos, quotes, wikipedia research and fashions brilliant theories about what's behind it all.

These she posts on a major "Losties" fan board and then gleefully watches as the number of views and comments grows, responding to the intriguing or combative ones and stoking the fire of her inspiration.

But, she never meets any of these people nor talks to them on the phone. And, she never EVER says anything about her own TG past. Why in blazes WOULD she?!

But here - here on this blog on this TG web site I created to share my experiences (for the benefit of others on the same path, for the better understanding of those not of a TG nature who stumble in here, and also for my own artist's satisfaction of sharing) - here I can say anything about anything without offending anyome (more or less, as long as I stay away from the political or religious).

But you know, since this site is about TG stuff, the only offense anyone will take if I talk about hiking or music or coin collecting or photography or poetry is that they may get bored. But they won't feel uncomfortable.

Imagine, taking a sugary-sweet candy and coating it in a bitter shell. Who'd want to eat that? Well some people might like the contrast, but I can't imagine that if your point is to share this wonderful new candy you created you'd have your best presentation by having people have to eat through bitter to get to it.

And that's the risk of mentioning the TG stuff in my posts elsewhere, but a risk that doesn't exist here.

Now, is t a flat and level playing field? Hell no! That's because there's one more component here - my own self-image. 99.9 percent of what goes on in my head has nothing to do with TG stuff. But if you even mention your TG background to a "civillian" then at least half of what they think about you is TG.

In other words, even just letting them know will tip the balance to the extent that people do not see you as you are anymore and never will. And that's even worth than them not experiencing my art and intellectual endeavors as I intended.

Want proof? I got a nice note from someone the other day who had read my book on story structure. The subject heading was "To a brilliant woman". I konw they meant it as a complement, but I couldn't help thinking that it also meant, "You are really smart, for a girl!"

Now if that is the way it is just being a woman, imagine how it taints every other interchange with others if they know you are, were, (forever will be?) TG? How can anyone appreciate you or your work just for its own merit if it is always put in some other context? i.e. Up And Coming Black Artist - First Korean Astronaut - Winner of the Women's 100 Yard Dash.

There's no getting away from this, but c'mon, do I have to go out of my way to shovel as much stuff between me and my audience as is humanly possible?

And yet.... As an artist, my transition is part of the artist's journey. It is a major thread in what matured my vision, molded me into the kind of creative individual I have become. BUT - my art isn't all about TG subjects, NOR does the subject permeate everything I do at some subliminal level. Sometimes, sure, but not often. Rather, it is an additional perspective from which I can draw when creating. So, you may see its brush-strokes in the finished image, but I'm not painting pictures of paint brushes.

Then, of course, there's the business concerns. If I put a big placard up on my story structure web site "Story Development Software from Melanie Anne Phillips - Former Man" I can't see that is would help sales. I'd probably go out of business.

(There was a guy named Chuck who inherited 100 grand a couple decades ago - true story - and he used it to open a burger joint called the "Up-Chuck". He went out of business in a week. I'd rather not take THAT path, if you don't mind).

So call me merchenary or say that I'm selling out. Go ahead - I've given you a command....

Great. Got that out of your system. Okay, then. So other than financial, it is the articstic thing and that is why this is the only place I can say anything.

Got it?!!!

Star Trek Struck

2009-05-26T18:13:00.000-07:00

Just saw the new Star Trek movie. I didn't know if I'd love it or hate it, but one thing I never expected was for it to shine a light on some emotional issues I'm grappling with right now.

First of all, the movie itself - great new renditions of the characters, lots of action, solid special effects, no plot to speak of, and one big problem I'll get to in a minute.

Second of all, the emotional issues. I lived with my wife for ten years after transition. I found myself drifting farther and farther away from her during those days (due to wanting to explore my new life). I met someone (Teresa), moved out, and then gradually moved farther away geographically - 90 minutes, six hours, and now a two day drive from Northern Oregon

During this time, I had worked really hard to maintain my relationships with her and my kids. At least I thought I had. But my idea of a relationship was to drive down, tell them all about what I was doing lately, then drive back.

Email was the same - sharing all the things that were important to me so they wouldn't feel left out. Now is that stupid or what? You don't show people you care by talking about yourself. You do it by asking about and listening to them.

I see now that each of them, especially my son, was relentlessly reaching out to me - looking for some sign - anything - to indicate that I really loved them, cared for them, cared about them. But all they got was my endless monolog about myself, dismissal of their overtures, and continued proof that I obviously didn't care about them.

Of course I cared about them more than my own life. But is that really true? Would I have gone into transition and robbed them of their father and of a normal life and a parent they didn't have to explain to friends and romantic interests? Would I have left and moved in with someone else? Would I have moved farther and father away? And would I have rebuffed with disinterest all their attempts to share their interests with me.

Hey, I'm a larger than life character. I live a big life. At least I like to think of myself that way. But how many public figures far more successful and famous than my meager status have been prominent and yet horrible parents. Beloved by the public but disappointing to the point of causing pain at home?

But you know, even twenty years after transition I hadn't seen it. It just never occurred to me. I was STILL so self-justified from the days when I got through transition by justifying it in my own mind as a moral imperative.

You probably iknow what I'm talking about. If you are in or went through transition, you have to muster your resolve. You have to risk family, friends, career et al. And the only way you can do this is to basically say, "I was born this way - didn't have a choice - therefore I don't have a choice now, and so I'll do this thing, regardless of the cost, and then do the best for everyone that I can afterwards.

For those of us who are long-time post-ops that's the quality that most bothers us about newbies. Those just starting out are so self-justified they literally CAN'T SEE how much IRREPARABLE damage they are doing to those around them, and how SELFISH they have become.

They see themselves as soldiers of human rights, starting in their own back yard - martyrs in the cause of being true to yourself. And these evangelists (because it suits their current purposes) trod all over everybody else's feelings, unawares, oblivious.

What about real sacrifice - those who work all their lives at jobs they hate to support their children - those who put their loved ones first, not saying "I put them first after this one thing which comes before them."

Truth is, you go into transition you ruin lives. Most will recover and build something frome the rubble - some won't.

But the damndest part is that as long-time post-ops, our attitude about newbies is the very same self-justified attitude we are complaining about in them. We self-justify by saying, "We've been there, done that, see a higher truth, and therefore can pass judgment about those newbies and their selfish doings." We see it as our duty to grab them by their frilly lapels and force them to see the pain they are causing. And all the while we still aren't seeing what's best for others. We've forgotten how close to suicide we all were, how much at the edge of mental illness, drug abuse, or all of the above. We sit in our self-satisfied new lives, decades after all the pathos and expect these poor souls to just step out of their problems and see the big picture. In other words, we're still telling them about us and aren't paying any attention to them.

I think I had that attitude before I started transition. I think I felt so crappy about my own self-worth that I had to be the center of attention to keep proving to myself I could be. I think in one way or another everyone who successfully transitions must have been the kindest, gentlest ass-hole in the world before they even started.

You got gender identity problems? Then you're an ass-hole. Can't help it. The kind of negative self-worth issues transgenderism causes will turn you into one before you are out of your teens. Not to infer that all ass-holes are transgendered, mind you. There's plenty of causes of that malady, but I'm only concerned with this one (because its all about me, isn't it?)

So having developed this trait of justifying myself, I relied on it to get through transition, move away from my family and keep the focus on myself, all the time feeling I was a god for how much I strived to keep in contact with my kids.

Bullshit.

How the hell did they ever manage to stay connected to me all these years? Well, they haven't now. I've pretty much lost my son - not to hatred (though for all I know there's some of that) but to dis-interest. My daughter used to call me every day. Then once a week. Then we'd email every day. Then a couple times a week.

How often did I call her? Almost never. And why? Because in order to feel that I was loved (self-worth issue) calling her wouldn't prove anything. But if she called ME, well then, she loved me! So to insure she would call (because she missed me) I didn't call her, thereby creating a vacuum that would draw her to me. Or at least that must be pretty clear to what my heart was thinking, even though such concepts, while familiar, were always just outside the conscious realm so I had plausible deniabitlity.

My son used to call me all the time and ask me to play video games over the internet with him. I had the game, but I just wasn't into that so I declined. He used to ask questions about guns because he liked the concept of target shooting. Wasn't my cup of tea so I deferred him to Teresa who has experience with firearms.

In short, I kept trying to get him interested in hiking and photography and writing and all the things that matter to me, even while slapping his offered hand away in the things in which he was interested.

And now, it's "Cat's in the Cradle" time. I loved that song as a young man, vowed never to let that happen to me. Yet here we are. That's how it works.

So - what does this have to do with Star Trek? Here the BIG problem I told you I'd talk about....

It's a time travel story. Because of the events that occur, history is changed for Kirk, Spock, Bones, Scotty, et al. In other words, all that happened in the original TV series, the Next Generation, and all the movies is erased as part of the plot of the new movie.

They didn't just say to the audience, "We're re-telling the legend and there will be many changes in our rendition." They said that and THEN said, "And by the way, all those wonderful emotinoal moments and all the characters you came to love like family never existed. Those stories never happened and never will happen."

Well isn't THAT a slap in the face. I don't care about being true to the way the story was told before. But I take all kinds of exception to all that being wiped away.

But, and here's the connection, isn't that my situation today? The future I might have had with my kids - the ball games, the birthday parties, the little day to day experiences that draw people together - all of it was erased by my self-justified transition, leaving the family, and moving away. I killed that future as surely as Star Trek killed the past.

I've always kept the belief that I'd "make it all up to them someday". I remember first having that thought one Christmas when I gave my parents (who had no money for a new couch) a picture of a sofa with a note saying I was going to make one for them. Never happened.

And I kept thinking that someday I'd make enough money so my mom could retire in comfort. She died in 1989.

In fact, just about any grandiose promise I've ever made I've failed to deliver (except of course to myself, as evidenced by the person I've become).

There is now making up for it later. And I've come to realize that. So, I figured if I can't make up for it, then at least I can keep promises from this point forward. But how can I get everybody back in my corner? How can I show them I have enough value to make it worth their while to give me another chance? (Note self-worth still sitting in the middle of this?)

I thought I'd begin by reminding them of all the great times we had as a family before transition began. I'd haul out the old videos and convert them to DVD and give copies to each of them (did this two years ago). Then I'd scan the best of the old family photos of our many vacations and special events from when the kids were little and turn them into an album I could present to the whole family with a CD copy for everyone, including a few pix of me now doing things with them to create the bridge I needed. (Did this last Christmas).

And lately I created a blog for the family pictures and videos I had not yet shown them so I could give them an ongoing experience of family as they checked in with all my frequent updates and new postings (Started that last week and was working on it just before I started writing this post).

But you see, just like Star Trek, I not only charted a coure to an alternate future, but I had always erased the past. How? The moment I revealed my decision to change sex, all their memories of who I was and what I was all about changed in that very instant. Everything they thought and felt about their family and their place in it and their relationships not just with me but with each other and all the other people we knew - all that changed into a new reality, retroactively, just as surely if some stupid time travel gag had re-written the past.

So all the harping I've done for the last couple of years about the past is trying to sell them on a history that just isn't there anymore. I'm trying to say, 'remember how you felt about this?" but they can't, because history has been changed and those things never happened.

Sure, they can recall the events, but the feelings are no longer there. They've been altered. Psychologists will tell you about retrograde changes that occur in old memories every time new information is added. Have any of us not re-evaluated someone based on new information? Have we not heard the phrase in the movies, "I thought you were my friend" when someone learns someone they trusted turned out to be working against them. Suddenly all the feelings they had of happiness or security are replaced with feelings of betrayal instead.

Note that betrayal isn't added onto the old fond memories - it replaces them. At that moment, the old feelings cease to exist and they are never coming back.

What a fool I've been to keep slapping the whole family with all these old momentos. Since they no longer mean anything to anyone but me, constantly drawing their attention to them is just perpetuating my life-long habit of putting the focus on me. It looks to them as if I just want to talk about those now, rather than what is current in their lives, which I still don't acknowledge since I am so desparate to reconnect I don't have time to come up for air from my own tunnel vision effort to force them to remember the past as "I" see it and then connect those feelings to me today.

All about me again.

Here's the rub. Now that I finally realize this, is there any way to correct it from 1,000 miles away? Those original family feelings were made not in an instant, but like snowfall building slowly into drifts. Every little question, every meal, every television program watched together created them. And transition washed them all away.

Now I'm 1/24th they way around the globe from them and all I have is phone and email. Since there is no past I need to build a new relationship with each of them and with all of them together as a family. But my daughter is married and away from home for five years. My son is thirty and has made good friends with the next door older neighbor who show him how to build things and takes him fishing. And Mary, my wife, has learned to be completely self-sufficient.

Even if it were possible to build new relationships with them, would THEY want to be any closer to me than the distance I've pushed them away? In other words, if we met for the first time today, being the people we have all become, would we have any reason to get to know each other? What's more, how many people you meet for the first time who live two days away have become your close friends?

I suppose Twitter and Facebook and email can make new friends and grow them closer, but you know, I'm 56 and I'm not sure that works for me. (Me again, see? Gotta be on my terms. I want them all to be closer, but only in the way I choose).

Clearly this attitude has got to change. But even if it does, what can I do? I have to believe there's still some sort of connection amongst us all. Perhaps the past was altered but not really erased, just an alternate reality that still has some touch points, some aspects of significance to us all.

I love it where I've moved. I love who I'm living with. I love the person I've become. But I love them all too. My task now is to listen like a SETI station for that faint voice from across the void. To tune in and connect and find common ground for communication. And, if possible with such an astronomical distance between us, build a relationship from this day forward, based on who we have all become in this parallel universe.

The Archives

2009-05-19T16:56:00.000-07:00

I don't know if it's being 20 years past transition, that I'm 56, or that I recently moved to Oregon after living my entire life in California. But whatever the reason, I find myself sifting through all the audio recordings, video tapes, photographs, and documents on story theory and psychology that I've made over the last half century and posting the best, most original, and most useful material up on the Internet.

Before I go any further, here's where you can find a lot of it....

First of all, my home page at http://melanieannephillips.com/. That's the central clearing house with links to all the other areas.

For people visiting this particular blog, you might be interested in the audio recordings I made during my transition, documenting the experience. You can download them in mp3 format at http://melanieannephillips.com/recordings/index.htm. Also included there are pre-transition recordings, and recordings after transition about my story and psychology theory work.

If you are interested in music, you can find pretty much everything I've created, before, during, and after transition at http://melanieannephillips.com/music/, art photography at http://melanieannephillips.com/photographs/index.htm, poetry at http://melanieannephillips.com/poems/, aw hell, you get the idea....

So back on topic, this is all about validation. You know that old saying, "Think outside the box?" Well, I came up with another version, "Inside, outside, your still thinking about the box!" Point being, if you really want to see the big picture, stop looking at the screen.

Okay, so most of my life I was seeking external validation, which made me become the founder of the first TG support web site on the planet, invent a new theory of story structure, new psychology, become a photographer, composer. Again, you get the idea - overachiever, and workaholic.

But the weird thing was, though I was prolific as God's loins, I never finished anything. Even when I painted the house - every time I'd get to the final area and just sort of drop the project. Music was never polished, photographs never enlarged and framed, audio recordings never edited, and so on.

What was I thinking? Well, I was trying the buckshot approach - throw out a lot of fishing lines and hope something bites. In other words, dabble in just about every creative or inventive area in which I had some basic talent, no matter how meager, and hope that I would get back vibes that would indicate there was external validation to be had there. Then I could drop everything else, focus on that one thing and make a name for myself.

But, though I was what others might call successful in several areas, I never go back those vibes, so I never focused and never professionally finished up with spit and polish - in short, I left everything raw and/or uncompleted.

Then I had this epiphany (after facial surgery, which, of course, changes everything) - Maybe the reason I wasn't getting back the vibes I wanted was because external validation isn't what I was looking for. In fact, I had lots of that! Perhaps it was internal validation! In other words, look outside the box! (See, if external was inside the box, then internal would be outside.... uh, well, it makes sense to me.)

So I changed tack. I swung my focus over to those things in which I gave myself internal validation - the things in which I saw my life as having value. For example, I began to upload audio tapes of my work developing the Dramatica theory of story. And I said to myself, "Self, even if you aren't recognized in your lifetime for the greatness you truly possess, it will come after your death if you just make sure your work is made public.

I threw myself into these projects. And after being a workaholic in the service of self-image for a while, I discovered I wasn't even getting back from myself the vibes I had sought! Crap!

And that's when the whole, "Inside, outside, still thinking about the box" thing came back round to my mind. It struck me that validation of ANY kind was still thinking about the box. I began to ask myself, why do I even need validation? Why do I even want it? What IS validation anyway???

Well, ultimately this line of thinking began to make me feel better, but I couldn't really see the mechanism why - not until watching a Discovery Channel program this evening about a group of people trying to survive on a 30 day trek across Alaska.

I, myself, along with Teresa and a few hiking buddies from time to time, like to take a one-week trek into the back country of Yosemite, or thereabouts, every year or so. There's something satisfying about carrying everything you need on your back, setting your own time frame, stopping to drink in the environment when you want, and challenging yourself against the elements.

When you set up camp for the night after a long hike over craggy terrain and sit next to your tent with your sleeping bag all set up inside, a nice fire with your dinner sizzling, and a tin mug of hot coffee warming your lap, there is something that goes way beyond validation of any sort - perhaps doesn't even connect to validation in any way.

I mentioned the word a bit earlier - it's satisfying. You find yourself satisfied with the situation, the environment, and your place and efforts in it. And this creates a contentment that lacks any element of laziness. It enables one to pause to reflect rather than rape your brains for answers.

I saw that in those Alaska trekkers, felt it before during those all-too-few hikes, and felt it again today. As I went to prepare dinner (about four paragraphs ago - since cooked and et), I took a cast iron frying pan out of the oven where we store it so I could bake some pork chops. As I held the heavy metal implement in my hand, that sense of satisfaction washed over me strongly.

And that feeling, deep and powerful, open up an insight in to how I have been changing of late, into why I've spent so much time working on these archives (and even why I hadn't ever tried to do anything with them before).

Boils down to this: I'm not a perfectionist at heart. Nor, am I a workaholic. I just have a fascination for experiences, sensory and mental. And when I experience something that moves me, intellectually or emotionally, especially if it is a new experience, I like to hold it in my mind, savor it a bit, and then send it off in a bubble, pure and complete, to drift where it will, like a message in a bottle.

It's not important if anyone ever finds it and "reads" the message so that they share the insight or experience. Sometimes it's just the way the bottle bobs in the waves. Sometimes, just sending the message about an experience becomes an experience of its own. Just like this posting, right here, right now.

I ask myself why I am doing this? What meaning does it have for me? Am I composing these words, taking this time away from an evening with my beloved Teresa and cat children to try and make a bigger name for myself? Nope. Am I doing it to help others who can benefit from my conclusions? Well I hope they (you) do, but that's not why.

I used to think I needed to create things in order to get them out of my head before I went mad, running in circles around the same ideas over and over again. But that was just a misreading of an emotion, not the motivation itself.

The reason I do this is because it brings me satisfaction. With each word I type, I circle in a little closer to the essence of a truth - bring it into focus just a little more clearly, refine it to a slightly higher degree of purity and, therefore, understanding.

Like a bird that lands on my shoulder (this has happened to me), I drink in the moment while it lingers, then embrace it in my mind when the moment is gone. I hone it with my thoughts, polish it with my feelings, then hold up my hand and let it take wing again.

It is almost as if all the experiences one can have in life are living breathing creatures, both gentle and severe. It is in the meeting of their natures and my own, the brief conjugation of our souls in which we eternally imprint upon one another the essence of all that we have perceived in our unique journeys through the existent world.

It is that communion in which I come closet to touching the face of God. And most miraculously, it is the time in which He comes closest to touching mine.

Download Free "Transition Tapes" MP3s

2009-05-06T08:50:00.000-07:00

Going through my archives, I've just uploaded all new digital transfers of my audio recordings made during transition in 1989 through 1992. You can listen to or download the free mp3s at http://heartcorps.com/journeys/audio/transition-tapes.htm

All 17 Album's of Dave's Original Music now available for free download

2009-05-05T20:35:00.000-07:00

Just finished uploading the last of over 8 hrs worth of free mp3s at http://melanieannephillips.com/music/dave.htm

Check out my early music from the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, right up to transition in 1989.

All my original music from the 1960s and 1970s

2009-05-04T20:12:00.000-07:00

I've just spent several days converting all my old original compositions to mp3 and uploading them here:

Click to Browse, Listen to, or Download

Been coming to terms with the past (about time, twenty years after transition). As part of this process, I'm been going through all my creative archives of writings, music, art, movies I directed, and such - before transition.

I've done all that stuff after transition too, but never felt comfortable looking at the old material. So, finally, here it is.

Most of it is crap, but theres a few good concepts for songs there, which I may now finally get around to finishing and properly recording now.

Of course, you can also check out my post-transition musical efforts here.

The Last Word

2009-04-30T13:11:00.000-07:00

The following two chapters of my diary have never been published.

They were written on April 26, 1997 when I thought I might continue my diary, though I had closed off the massive trilogy some time ago. But, after writing these two chapters, I put them aside, and dropped out of the tg community for nearly ten years.

At that time, Teresa had facial feminization surgery and I began my diary again, writing another two books and nearly doubling the length of the entire work.

So, with that in mind, here are two chapters of my diary that no one has ever read, save me:

THE LAST WORD

I have written three previous books about my personal journey. Each one documented a transition of spirit, body, and mind. These I have written for others, as a winding path that illuminate the terrain we all must travel, each with a different course. I knew, as I wrote them, the nature of the problem I faced. And each word that I penned was descriptive of a new insight into the workings of that problem or part of an attempt to fathom a solution.

In the end, I came to a full understanding of what had driven me in this quest. In three volumes I arrived back at the beginning, yet changed by the experience. As Zen would have it, "First a mountain is a mountain, then it isn't, then it is."

I had hoped that this closed the book on the one, central, crucial inequity of my soul. I rejoiced that no longer would I feel compelled to spew my insides, raw and quivering, onto a page for all the world to see. I reveled in the freedom of a life away from words, where I might wake up in the morning like a normal human being and wonder what to have for breakfast, rather than strain my mind against an issue, compelled to find a way to express it.

I should have saved myself the trouble.

While it is true that in writing the first three volumes of my diary I did resolve the central issue they explored, it is also clear that something still remains. Once the personal cheering died down, I found within myself a lump in my heart - the same lump I had felt before I began my journey. I tried to reason it away, "It is just the last stage of healing". I tried to will it away, "I am in control of myself. There is no reason to feel as I do. I command you to leave me." I tried to distract it away, "Let me focus on the outside world instead of the inner turmoil." Yet, nothing worked.

I suppose I knew in my heart that the lump was real and would not budge in response to any of the forces I might bring to bear. But, I could not admit this to myself, for I am so sick of the effort to find happiness, it is almost preferable to simply accept a comfortable misery.

What compounded the difficulty was that this problem, unlike the one I had resolved earlier, was unknown to me. Oh, I knew it by feel all right, but as I begin this fourth, and hopefully last, volume of my diary I still have no intellectual understanding of what it is. In fact, that is why I am writing this book - to give this feeling a name so I can uproot it, tear it from my soul regardless of the cost, and fling it into some flaming cauldron where I can watch it ignite, sizzle, and burn until it is no more that smoking ash. I hope it suffers greatly.

In this book, I do not know the problem I am struggling to solve. I cannot describe insights into the workings of something I cannot see. I have no means to fathom a solution to a problem invisible. But if there is to be any hope of someday being free of whatever the hell it is, I must step once more into the fray - but this time into darkness, and not to illuminate the terrain for others, but to grope toward a light of my own.

This book, I write for myself.

Chapter One
Once More Into the Fray

I should have know this book was coming for I had recently started to dream. Dreaming, for me, is always a precursor to writing. First, I find myself getting agitated, almost as if I had consumed several pots of coffee, a multitude of Snickers bars, and gone for three days without sleep. I twitch, I jerk, I get a feeling of incredible fatigue at the base of my spine. My whole nervous system gets wired and then, finally, I crash into a deep sleep. And in this sleep come dreams.

There is one dream in particular that I absolutely know is an attempt by my subconscious to give me the answer which I seek. But the dumb fool at the helm just don't get it. It is a house - oh, but how can I describe how this house feels? The symbols are so personal that I might write three additional volumes just laying the ground work to permit some empathy.

The house is always the same house, by feel, but it comes in several recurring forms. In one, it is a large, single level mansion, almost, on a beach - or rather, on a large cliff over-looking the beach. There is a mood of despair evenly spread over the atmosphere from the water to the forest behind the house. But it is not deep despair, but rather a hobbled joy that is reduced by knowing that outside the local realm encompassed by the beach, cliff and house, there is suffering elsewhere.

In the dream, I find myself at several different vantage points of this geographic space. Sometimes I am down on the beach, which is littered with dead branches from dark trees which have washed up on shore. They are leafless, and though the outside bark is dark with water from the sea, inside they are dry and brittle, and small twigs will snap off to the touch. I know this, though I have never snapped them, nor seen anyone else do it. I think we are all afraid to. Why? Because if we tamper with them, the edges of our little world might collapse, and then we would be made to suffer as well, rather than live in a false joy made somber by the knowledge of the suffering of others less… fortunate?

The branches are embedded in the sand. Deeply.

The sand itself if cream or gray - it is hard to tell which. It is littered with small, hard, rounded pieces of charcoal from campfires on the beach of long ago. And there are little bits of tar.

The cliff is made of dark brown material, rocky, yet crumbling, like wet sand stone. But it is dry. And from here, down on the beach, the wide, sprawling house is visible at the edge of the cliff: not in danger of falling, but inaccessible from this point of assault.

And then, I am inside the house. It is large with rooms. There are no straight corridors or halls in the place, but the walkways snake around corners so that no room is really visible from any other. One large room seems to be the central area. It has an outside view, not to the beach, but to an inner courtyard, or perhaps to outside the house altogether. It doesn't matter. I never look through those windows, nor feel the interest to do so. But the windows ARE important. They are perhaps three feet square, in single panes, set into a lattice work of glossy white painted two by fours, which make up almost the whole wall in that direction. The wall makes me uneasy, because the architecture design of the windows is so uninspired that it degrades or cheapens what might otherwise be a fairly nice room.

There are usually other people in the rooms, but I seldom interact with them as a group, though from time to time I will have a conversation with one of them, sometimes for an extended period.

One of the first things I wonder when I wake up in this dream is who owns the house? Invariably, it is an elderly lady, not unlike Katherine Hepburn. She is a woman of the world, well travelled, but too frail to do so any more. Still, she has amassed a great fortune, and also a great knowledge built of experience. She is particularly apt in terms of design, but sometimes impractical.

Last night, for example, I awoke in the house to find myself in a room around the corner to the left from the wall of windows. In fact, I was staring at a wall that adjoined the window wall as if it were the other leg of the letter "L". This wall was regular white plaster. There was track lighting at the top of the wall, pointing down at several pictures - paintings - all rather large, perhaps three feet in width and four feet high, though all slightly different sizes. The paint used, in conjunction with the lighting, made the colors almost flourescent in their intensity.

I looked down at the floor and off to the right, which continued into the large kitchen. The floor was made of black and white tiles, one foot square, but not solid color - more like those that have little streaks of gray in them here and there for effect. The front door to the house was behind me, so that anyone who entered would come face to face with the wall of pictures at the end of the entry way, from which they could turn to the right to go into the kitchen, or jog slightly to the left to enter the room with the windows, which would then be off to the right.

The floor was yellowed, as if aged or perhaps just over waxed for many years. I could see pathways cut into the yellow by some kind of buffing or striping machine which had been recently employed to rejuvenate the surface. Each of the paths revealed a bright, fresh, new-looking surface of gleaming black and white tiles (each with its gray streaks) but it was clear the paths were not a serious attempt to do the whole floor, but just a sloppy test of sorts, for they meandered like snail trails in a random fashion. The paths were all about a foot in diameter, indicating the size of the stripping machine's buffering head.

And there, sprawled out comfortably on her side in front of the wall of pictures as I watched from the direction of the door, was the land lady.

There was a small but immediate fear on my part - actually more of an uneasiness - that she had come to tell us to leave the house. This would not be, I knew, from lack of paying the rent or from anything we had done wrong, but simply because she wanted it for other uses. (In fact, both my parents and myself have experienced that in fact, as they were evicted from the house I grew up in so that the land lord's son could move in and Mary, the kids, and I were evicted from our most wonderful house up in the Burbank hills by the land lady who wanted her daughter to move in.) Clearly, this portion of the dream may be very transparent.

In fact, it is interesting that in the dream I do not know who my family is, but just that I have one. It feels more just like the sense of "family", which could be my parents or Mary and the kids, but it doesn't matter in the dream. What matters is the family feeling - family in potential danger, though it would really be just a minor physical inconvenience, though a true emotional heartache if we were forced to leave.

But, she is not there to evict us. She is there to fix the place up.

She has just hung these pictures on the wall, and they look really good. Part of me is incredibly happy and proud to be able to show off my wonderful house to future guests who might come. Part of me is depressed that the house will now reflect her more than me. In this dream, I am male.

The land lady explains to me how she came to paint these pictures - the artistic approach she uses, in the hope of educating me so that I too might do the same. But although I can understand her concepts, I know that these are just the mechanics of what she does, and that I will never have the inspiration to put the mechanics to such wonderful use. I feel as if I have no creativity at all, and wish I could get on with my life without having someone try to teach me some.

As she patiently, patronizingly, explains her technique - why she made the choices she did, I notice that a lot of the painting have large expanses of yellow in them. One at the top of the wall is almost all yellow, except for a bright green cartoon style cow, perhaps six inches high near the top of the picture. It is standing, facing to the right.

Another painting, toward the lower left on the wall, is also predominantly yellow, but done in much darker tones. The lower third of the painting, however, is the same bright yellow of the upper painting. Not an obnoxious yellow, but more of a creamy yellow, friendly, pleasant. It looks out of place against the darkness. I look closer and I see that the brighter colors were clearly added later, after the original painting had been completed. I glance down and see that the painting lists two copyright dates: 1993 and 1997, just like the pages I create on my web site (though I don't make that connection in the dream).

I feel odd about the dual copyright and the repainting. I wonder where is art when it needs to be redone? I hate myself for liking the new version better. I hate her from pretending to know, when she clearly makes mistakes, and I wonder if maybe she isn't just lucky.

There are two repairmen working on the steps to my left that lead to the second story. (Now the house had a second story). The wood of the stairs is dark walnut or mahogany, and polished. Actually, one repairman is in the room with the windows, I can see him about twenty feet away. The other is working on the steps some five feet to my left. I look up to see him shake his head in response to the land lady's dissertation, clearly finding her to be addled. He is here to work because he is being well paid, because she is rich. But he feels she is senile or just not in touch with the real world. He does not see me notice his expression.

And then, I am out in front of the house, and down the road perhaps half a mile. There is no forest now, it is all open plains, with very lightly rolling hills. I can see all the way back to the house, which is single story again. The hills are only five feet high, merely swells in the landscape and gently, gradually rising and falling. Not that they move in the dream, just that they are gradual and not sharp.

As far as I can see, the land is covered with yellow/green tall grass, perhaps, eighteen inches high. It sways slightly in a wind which I cannot feel. I know that the grass was green just recently, but summer approaches, and the dryness has turned much of the grass just recently, though not completely, yellow.

I see that we, my family and I, had been driving in a station wagon, and have pulled over to the side of the unlined, single lane, paved road near a gully in the otherwise flattish landscape. Mary is there, standing near me to my left. As I look down into the gentle gully, I see that is has several patches of snow. It must have lasted so long because it was hidden from the sun by its depth in the gully, I muse to myself.

There are perhaps ten or fifteen school children, ten or twelve years old, dressed for school but having snowball fights and laughing as they run across the patch of snow. Mindi is there as well. I believe there are other parents there, but I cannot see them. I get the feeling that this snow was just discovered, and the other parents, as well as myself, felt that such a rare treat must be enjoyed, even at the expense of being late for school.

Mindi runs up and hands me a snowball. It is not like any snow I have ever felt. It holds together like a gel, sort of like that kid's toy called "GAK", but it isn't gooey or sticky. The snow ball is about two and a half inches in diameter, about the size of a cue ball, and as I hold it, I know that it will not splatter should I throw it, but would just glop. It does not melt, it is not cold.

In this part of the dream I am neither male nor female, or perhaps I should say I feel a bit of each.

I woke up.

This morning I went about my business, getting breakfast for Mindi, checking my email, driving Mindi to school. I returned, chatted with Mary and went out to water the lawn. Part way through, I began to realize I had something I needed to write. I tried to ignore it: I don't want to write any more. But, the feeling continued to grow. The images I needed to describe welled up in my head. Some kind of emotional connection among them defined itself and demanded documentation. I found myself unable to deny the force of the ideas.

I struggled to finish the watering, but could not keep from hurrying, even though I knew with the dry Santa Ana winds we have been having, my grass would turn yellow within a day if I didn't not finish the job properly. I held out, but as soon as I was sure the grass would survive, I locked the dog back in the back yard and raced into the house to get the damnable words out of my head. I knew they wouldn't leave me alone until I released them on paper. Which is a process with which I am all to familiar. A process I had hoped I had left behind.

Welcome to my next book.

Chapter Two
What a Tangled Web

I have a huge web site. You can find it at http://heartcorps.com/melanie/. I give you the address because I want you to go. I want EVERYONE to go! And there-in lies my problem. As of this writing, I've been building that web site for almost two years. It's become an obsession. Why? Because I want to be a celebrity.

I crave popularity, but not in the personal sense. At least not consciously. I want my web numbers to be HUGE. I want everybody and his brother to link to my site. I want people to hear my music, see my pictures, read my words. Why do you think I'm REALLY writing this. Yes, I know I just said I'm doing it for me, and I am, in a way. I'm doing it for me because I hope that by putting down these words and publishing them on the internet, I'll get more acclaim.

Why do I even care? I have no idea. Oh, I've gone over all the typical stuff, like maybe I'm substituting virtual relationships with real ones, or keeping people at arms length while I expose my soul. After all, my email address is hidden in only a few places on my web site, and NONE of them are in the transgender section. (Sounds like some new frozen food in the supermarket, doesn't it - "the transgender section". Maybe all it has are cold fish!)

I don't know why I crave this attention, but then again, that's the other reason for writing this book: to try and find out. Every morning, when I should be paying attention to my kids as they get ready for school, the first thing I do is race over to my computer, connect to the net, and see how my "stats" are going. I check the number of people who have come to my site, compare it to daily and weekly totals, compare it to other sites, compare it to all kinds of averages. Then, I sign on to a web stat server to see how I rank compared to all the other sites listed.

Right now, on a list called the "Top 1000" list of personal web sites (they actually list over 1500) I stand at #91. Now I ought to be proud of that. I suppose I am. But even more so, I am frustrated that I'm not in the top 10. The top 10, after all, get on their own special list. I want on that list! I don't have to be number one, mind you, just in the top 10, but I won't rest until I get there. I figure if I get a 1000% increase in visitors, I'll make it. That shouldn't be too hard to do. Yeah, right!

On another list, they break it down alphabetically. Each letter presents the list in a series of tables, broken into sections of twenty at a time. So, the best you can do is be in the top twenty of any letter. I'm #19 in the "M"s, so I'm content with that list.

So, my web site has over 40 meg of material right now. I've got all the state of the art stuff up there. But am I enjoying it? No way! Where are the people asking me for interviews? Where is the right up in one of the premiere web magazines? Why has only one person in two years purchased a CD of my album of original music?

Now I have to ask myself - I get a lot of people to my site: right now, over 3500 per week! But I still don't feel like I'm popular. Why? And why do I care anyway?

When I built my web site, I was absolutely obsessively compelled. There were not easy authoring tools in those days. I had to learn HTML programming and do it all in a text editor. I spent three miserable weeks sopping up information from all over, trying to self teach an education in how to get web pages up and running. And, I did it.

Now, I'm no programmer. I've never learned a lick. And I absolutely LOATHE anything to do with it. But I needed to get on the web. I needed to put my stuff out there and in front of an audience. Why? Didn't matter, the drive was undeniable, so why bother trying to understand it.

Well, I got my site up, but included absolutely nothing about the transgender community. In fact, I made a real point to go incognito. I stopped doing "The Subversive" gender cyberzine, made no appearances on the Transgender Community Form on America Online (which I founded in 1991, by the way - toot own horn), and I even stopped doing local speaking engagements for the gender community.

But then, I decided to create a separate transgender site. People could link from it to my home page, but not the other way around. So, anyone learning about me from the TG community could see my other stuff, but anyone coming to me from Dramatica, say, would not find anything about TG.

But, even on the TG site, I didn't want to admit or associate with TG people or even ally myself with the concept that I WAS TG. So, I always referred to that group as the Gender Community, rather than the TRANSgender community in all my writings and menus. I called the Gender Folk, which is kinda nice and cutesy in it's own way, but was really a dodge on my part.

Well, just last week I finally put the TRANS back in GENDER on my pages. Why? I have no idea. I also finally put up links to other TG web sites. I had never before wanted to link to any other sites. After all, that means I would be associating with them, and people might think I was one of them!

At the moment, I've pretty much got everything I ever thought, did, or created up on the web. There's still about a hundred various short articles I've written, the rest of one of my screenplays, and my mom's book to be put up, but compared to what's already there, it's nothing.

What I'm doing right now it getting the rest of my transition diary posted. I had gotten a little more than half of it up (through chapter 33) but was holding off because chapter 34 had some uncomplimentary things to say about Chris and Steve, and we were in contract negotiations at the time for a major future deal. I held off for about six months, but it was driving me crazy.

I turned my attention to that backlog of one hundred articles, but found so little fulfillment in publishing them that I just couldn't muster the motivation. So, I switched systems and servers and imported my whole site into Microsoft Front Page. I added new backgrounds, more animation, background music, discussion groups, and "much, much more!" I started The Subversive again, and just went nuts trying to find ways to improve the site.

But, that didn't do it. Finally, I had a talk with Mary, and she agreed that Chris and Steve probably never ever read my diary anyway, and don't know anyone who does, so I changed my mind and began to post the rest of it. Instead of one chapter ever three months or so, I posted six new chapters in two days! And, I'm shooting to get the whole thing up by the end of next week. Why? I don't know.

Somehow, I want my COMPLETE story told, not just a part of it. But, as mentioned in this introduction, the story still isn't complete. So what the hell am I doing?

One thing I really want to do is start putting up Real Video clips of various things I do. Like playing piano and guitar, giving lectures about gender, Mental Relativity, or Dramatica, comedy segments with jokes and anecdotes, and best of all, little mini-stories where I can play different roles, like a sexy spy, or warrior princess.

This all comes from my obession to document my sexy success at being a woman while I'm still young enough to have anything to document. I'm really worried here! I'm 44, I can see the crow's feet in the mirror. My biological clock is about to go "sproing"!

On the one hand, I want a real life moment when I walk down the street in a sexy mini skirt or on the beach in a bikini and get ogled. But I've done that already. But it never felt like it looks in the movies, in the fantasy. I guess I've fulfilled the reality of becoming who I am, but I haven't fulfilled the fantasy yet. I've spent so much time trying to understand and logic it out, I never noticed the feeling.

Just yesterday, I looked in the mirror and said, "My God, I get to be a woman for the rest of my life!" (Or something to that effect.) I mean, I've been so wrapped up in creating stuff and explaining how I felt, that I hadn't felt anything.

You know, if you spend all your time thinking about your feelings, you don't have a chance to feel any of them. You run into the law of diminishing returns. It's just like trying to keep the kitchen clean - you work like blazes, but it never happens - at least, not around this house! After a while, the frustration level rises to the point that you just give up.

So why do I keep working on the web after two years when, clearly, it is not getting me what I want? Well, part of the problem is that I don't know what I want. Still, the web feels like it is the best path to getting what I want, whatever it is.

Have you ever felt that? That you had some kind of inner need that you couldn't put your finger on, yet you could feel it eating away at you? And then you run frantically in circles looking for something to make the feeling go away. And nothing does. But it continues to grate, and eat, and make you raw, so you run around even faster. Until… something pops up that just simply feels like it holds the answer.

My, God! You are so relieved that there is something you can do. You throw yourself into it. You dive in head first, delve into the heart of the activity, immerse yourself completely. Every once in a while, you come up for air and realize that the feeling hasn't gotten any better. But, the activity STILL feels like it holds the answer just as much as it did before, so you dive right back in again.

I don't know, maybe it is just that my attention is so occupied by the web activities that I don't have any mental resources left to think about the lump, the pain, the problem. Perhaps it is a salve, an anesthetic that numbs me ("comfortably numb") to the pain for which no cure has been encountered. Maybe what draws me to these activities is simply the cessation of pain, or at least a distraction from it. As my son once said, "I've got to find something to take my mind off all these distractions."

Well if this is the case, then as long as I keep working on the web, I'll keep hiding the problem, and won't be looking the more fruitful places for an answer. That's the credo of the workaholic, isn't it? Occupy your mind so you don't suffer the pain of thinking.

A few weeks ago, I tried to limit my time working on the web. But I just threw myself into other time-killing projects. So, I tried to limit my time acting on any creative notion. I actually think that the reason I am bubbling over with creative ideas every waking moment is that I'm never without something to keep my mind off my unfulfillment.

Where is this leading? Again, I don't know. Maybe this who book is just another activity to anesthetize my heart. That seems likely, since everything else I've ever done has fit that bill. But I guess hope does spring eternal, or perhaps people in this situation have the gambling bug, because I can't help feeling that this one might just be the winner.

Man, was I naive!

2009-04-30T11:00:00.000-07:00

Here's a silly little article I wrote in 1997 - all pompous and arrogant.

This is the secret for women working in a male society. When they establish a goal for you, if it
seems that the path will be a pleasurable one, make that commitment. But the moment it seems that the terms are getting worse or the conditions are more harsh than expected, it’s time to renegotiate.

Now, males see this as going back on a commitment. “Hey, you said you’d do this! I didn’t have
any control over the fact that the conditions got rougher.” That is true, you didn’t. But you do have control over making them less rough. Men will never think of this. It will seem completely arbitrary, like you are being a prima donna, if you say, “I want something in exchange for this hard effort.” “Then why didn’t you tell me in the beginning? Why didn’t you tell me at the onset?” Because that’s not the way women’s minds work, you jackass.

The point is, they are not being jackasses from the point of view of other men. And by you calling them a jackass, you are being a bitch from their standpoint. But you are not being a bitch from the standpoint of other women, unless they have been brainwashed by men because you have used their language, their culture, their educational system as the only tools available to train yourself as to what is proper and what is improper. It is not right for women to hold back on this one.

Similarly, when men say this is a necessary speed to achieve in accomplishing a task, that speed is going to appear to be completely arbitrary to women. Remember, this is when men and women have agreed on a goal. That is when they will disagree on method - requirements and speed. Women don’t measure the process linearly. They aren’t looking at how long it takes. Women are looking for a sense of completion. Men are looking at, “How far do I have to go?” So to them, they figure out when they want to be there, and it picks out a speed. Only then, do they figure out if it is something they like doing or not. If they like the process, well then, the longer it takes, the better. But if they expect to obtain elements that will make them even happier when the goal is achieved, then they will go at it as fast as they can, short of turning the effort into a negative one (for them).

That’s why women appear fickle to men: that they change the direction they are going based on
achieving a pleasant experience. But men are just as fickle, because they change the requirements which they see as essential along the way. So, they start out telling you how wonderful it will be because they are looking at the end of it, and then the going gets a lot tougher. Rather than using the resources they have to make the conditions better, they use the resources they have to make the process shorter.

Men don’t understand time. They’re afraid of losing it. We don’t understand space. We’re afraid of misusing it. We must, therefore, realize that intrinsically men and women are different species mentally. We don’t see things at all alike. We can converge our views, triangulate on a particular
object - a goal, a purpose - but when we do, we will find ourselves at great divergence as to why
we are doing it in the first place.

It’s like two flat rulers with a marble in between them. If you press down on one side and bring the ends together, the other side will be at it’s farthest apart. But if you press that other side together, the first side will split apart. That’s the nature of paradox, the nature of the difference between men and women, time and space. You can hold one end together, but the other must be apart. All you can do with paradox is pick where you are going to put it. That’s the nature of being unjustified.

The justified person says, “The paradox is here.” The unjustified person says, “Where do I want to put the paradox?” The nature of problem solving is determining where the paradox should go. “Do I want to change the way I think about something, or change the thing?” That’s problem solving. “Should I ignore current observation because of my beliefs, or should I ignore my beliefs because of current observation?” Ignoring the paradox is justification.

It sounds like something John Kennedy would have said: “Ask not if what you believe should be
changed because of what you observe; ask if your observations should be changed because of what you believe.”

An interesting parallel. And in fact, parallel is the one thing we haven’t addressed. You can’t ever bring them both together, but you can split them both completely apart. Something to be explored at a future date.

In trying to develop a new, non-linear logic for women in Mental Relativity, I’m not doing it from the standard female point of view dealing with it emotionally; getting a feeling for it’s meaning. Rather, I’m going from the male point of view, getting an understanding of it through linear logic. I’m using their own tools against them. Male science is not introspective. It questions its results, but never its motivations.

The motivation in male science is a given: “We need to know because knowledge is better than
ignorance.” Who says? To women, that is not necessarily true. Most women, however, would
believe this because of the training they’ve had by men. They’ve been brainwashed to see it the
male way, and hobbled from using their own innate abilities.

The concept of learning linear logic and having no alternative is the mental equivalent of female
circumcision. Fortunately, unlike it’s physical counterpart, mental circumcision is reversible.

My function here is to turn male science back to look at its own beginnings, and when it does, it will find itself to be just as arbitrary as it has always perceived female desires to be.

Diary Out Take

2009-04-29T20:22:00.000-07:00

Here's one from 1991 that I intended at the time to use, perhaps as a conclusion to my diary. But, as I recall, I never included it and never published it before. Then again, the durn diary is 1200 pages long written over 20 years, so who knows if its in there or not!

Anyway, I am going through all my archives to get rid of (publish) anything of value so I can put all the crap in the virtual attic and get the custodianship of it all off of my back.

And in that spirit, I give you the following unused(?) diary entry called, "Backword" (like the opposite of "foreword", get it?)

As I write this, I am no longer a man.

That is the first sentence I intended to write in my closing statement since the moment I wrote the Foreword in October, 1989. This was to be a parallel entry, a mirror image report of the post-transitional me. But now, 16 months later, that static, logical form no longer holds truth. For in reality, I am so different a person than the one that wrote the Foreword that even the structure of the piece is inappropriate to express the nature of my present self.

As I re-read that opening misif, I have trouble - no, I find it impossible to empathize with the pain and frustration. The stiff, stilted treatise says more by its layout than by its content. And if I can no longer remember what it felt like to be Dave, I can look at him from the outside and feel pity, respect, and indebtedness simultaneously.

I have not yet had surgery; I suspect someday I will. But that has become such a minor issue in my life that I seldom consider it anymore. Being a woman has become so ordinary that the logistics of it are as natural to me as any genetic female. I have not been "read" in over four months now, and have ceased to worry about it. I work, play, and nurture my friendships as simply Melanie, with disregard for being "found out" and my conscious thoughts on others rather than myself.

Mary has accepted me completly over the past two months. I am at home as I am at work as I am. Clothing, mannerisms, voice: nothing compromised from being myself. We go everywhere together as two women: to the store, to the movies, to the park. The kids have adjusted to calling me Melanie in public, and seem so much happier, now that my hurt is no more.

Successes that had alluded me previously are achieved almost daily in both goals and fulfillment. My list of friends met as Melanie grows geometrically. And should they find out about my past, it only seems to deepen our relationship. My career is skyrocketing with the completion of the feature film, "Social Suicide" that I have edited and was recently screened at Universal Studios. Accolades for the editorial prowess exceed my wildest imaginings.

And yet my happiness stems not from these tangibles, nor from the newness of womanly endeavors I may now pursue, but rather from the simple ability to be myself with disregard - no, with lack of fear for the reaction of others.

"All that Dave was is still a part of me." - a line of dialog from the movie, 2010. But these words describe my feelings as if they had been written for me. The "me-ness" that now comprises my being was always there, but largely unexplored. Basic yearnings drifted up from territory unknown and were filtered by that small portion of myself I had deemed acceptable for public consumption. But I was afraid to look at their source.

So that small fragment of myself was made to function as my totality, and the process of transition, more than anything else, served to open the curtains on the whole stage, "that undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns." And this traveller has not returned as well.

For even though Dave is still a part of me, he is a very small part. And the thoughts that filled his mind are only eddies in my larger consciousness.

As I try to follow their stream I can almost feel the smallness of them; I can almost sense how blind I truly was. And in that respect, Dave was right - he had to die for me to live. But I can now clearly see that this death is not a ceasing, but an altering through growth. Dave, in fact, was dead for many years before he yielded to me. But "yield" is such a minimizing word. It is more true that he simply let go of an artificial equalibrium and allow the vectors of change to follow their natural progression.

So the pity for Dave does not reside in his "demise", but in the duration of his condition in the first place. I experience a fullness of being now that I could never have imagined when I started. I simply proceeded from the hope that the lack I felt with each passing failure to find tranquility could actually be filled. And, indeed, it has.

So many have been lost in the journey down this road. Mates, families, friends, careers - dashed to ruins on the rocky cliffs that edge the treacherous trail. I have, for reasons unknown to me, been blessed to avoid a single such loss. In fact, these things have flourished far beyond their condition at quest's start.

And so, as the confident, at peace woman - no, PERSON I have become, I respond to Dave's final thoughts in his Foreword: His pain is soothed, his frustration satiated. And in fulfillment of his wish, I have no regrets at all - not one.

Melanie Anne Phillips
Burbank, California
March 9, 1991

From 1993

2009-04-29T16:36:00.000-07:00

More emails to a girlfriend at work from about a year after reassignment surgery:

February 4, 1993
From: Melanie
Date: Thu, Feb 4, 1993 10:10
Subject: RE: How's school going?
To: Barb'ra

Well, I FINALLY get a moment to write you back! Chris and Steve are so into writing the actual Dramatica program engine, that I am providing them with theory information from the moment I arrive until they reluctantly let me go home. Steve has been putting in some 16 hour days and coming in for the same amount of time on Saturday and Sunday as well. He is really intent on his work! But, the results are nothing short of spectacular, as the engine appears to be doing everything we theorized it would. THAT'S a relief after almost three years of effort without ever knowing if we were truly onto something revolutionary, or just stuffed full of wild blueberry muffins!

As for school, I'm having a wonderful time. Miriam (my friend in my psychology class) asked me to be her study partner, so we're getting together at the library this Saturday to go over our class notes (and talk about our respective boyfriends and our jobs). I met a nice guy in Trig class the other night - Eric. He's about my age (but also looks younger - pat on own back ) and is also re-taking trig to help with his job prospects. He's not really my type, but still its nice to be approached. At least I have a friend in that class, which is hard 'cause the teacher has such a stick up his ass!

Anyway, it really doesn't matter, as I came there to learn, not to be entertained.

One of the most interesting things so far, is that what I am learning in Trig and Psych I bring back here to the office, and then am pleased to discover that we described those very functions in our model without really knowing what they represented. In other words, we built something that works FIRST, and now we are beginning to understand how we did it. Weird!

I'm already in a srpingtime spirit. Still enjoying Victoria magazine (thanks again!) and dreaming of balmy days like this one. Wish I was out in a green country meadow today with the wind blowing through my hair and a picnic lunch on a plaid blanket. *sigh* Ah, well, back to work and goals and Dramatica and shit. (oops!)

From: Melanie
Date: Thu, Apr 22, 1993 9:41
Subject: Off to the dentist!
To: Barb'ra

I have this one troublesome tooth (the top left, farthest back molar). From time to time over the years, it has led uprisings against my contentment with sensitivity to hot or cold or touch. Well, this time its gone too far! Either a part of a filling fell out, or it cracked, or it got infected, or a cavity has hollowed it out. Whatever, I have an "emergency" appointment with the dentist at 11:00 am today. I don't know if the tooth will survive, but I really don't care as long as it's stopped! I've always hated that particular tooth anyway, and I'm sure the feeling is mutual!

Recovered nicely from the Dramatica session at USC, but I still can't shake that hanging on flu bug that I thought I got rid of a week ago! That, coupled with some swelling and infection from the tooth gets me really flying sometimes, when I pop an antihistamine for my alergies! Homemade hallucinagenics! I think its going to cool off with Andy for a while. He has always wanted a commitment from me (even three years ago) and I have never wanted to give one. This time I was able to give more (as I was not afraid of reaction at home) but it is still not enough for him, but any more is too much for me. I guess its not that I love Andy, but that I love BEING with Andy, which is a whole different scene. Anyway, we have moved out of acceleration, and now our relationship has a steady speed. I think a couple weeks ago was the high water mark. How long it continue in a stable state without growing, I do not know - maybe a month, maybe forever. Anyway, I feel much better about toning it down a bit because it gives me a touch more time with my kids, and time to relax without having to think about what somebody else wants. So, I see Andy for breakfast on Wednesdays, Coffee and poetry reading on Thursday nites, and stay over on Friday until Saturday morning, when he has to go to a class. That gives me the whole weekend free with the family. Now I can take the kids to Disneyland or camping or whatever, without having to do tradeoffs with the Andy schedule like I used to. Well... I'll just wait until Dramatica is out and I become a famous rich bitch, of spurious background, and that should net me all the men I can handle!

From: Melanie
Date: Fri, Apr 23, 1993 10:14
Subject: Stand up at the "Tea N' Tea"
To: Barb'ra

Well, I only mangaged 2 hours of sleep last night. That's because I had a big Psych paper to write, AFTER the Dramatica Class, AFTER I did a routine at the open mike at the Tea N' Tea. I decided to do an experiment with the performance that I could use in my Psych paper. So, after I read a poem, I linked it into a stand-up comedy routine as the "world's first transsexual comedienne". I did a bunch of sex change jokes based on personal experience. I wanted to see how reactions would change when the regulars found out about my history. The problem with transition is, that if you are up front about it, that becomes part of people's first impressions.

You can never shake it, and they will never look at you just as a woman, but as a sex-change, ie: "the sex-change named Melanie". But if you can have them meet you first as just plain old Melanie and THEN let them know, the will think of you as Melanie (who also happened to have had a sex-change). Its a conundrum all transition people have to deal with. On the one hand, you really want to be honest and share the first 36 years of your life - all that you are. But on the other hand, if you do share, you will never be just one of the girls. There's really no way out. First you struggle not to be picked out as a freakish guy in drag, but the moment you start making it, you run into the problem of "to tell or not to tell". That was one of the big reasons I had for going back to college in the first place. I was so honest around here, that I had no idea what life as a woman would be like if people didn't know. And I can tell you, it really is different.

But I really don't know if its because they treat me differently or because of my own insecurities. Nonetheless, to find some peace on this issue (especially since Dramatica will force me into the limelight) I've been doing all these readings, and the stand-up routine and stuff to get an idea of what life will be like after fame, and also to figure out how to deal with future friends. I found out there's no way to completely get out of the problem, but I can minimize it. I REALLY don't want to not talk about my past, for heaven's sake, its most of what I've done and nine tenths of my experience. But I don't want to give up the closeness I've felt with both men and women who don't know. So the thing is, I HAVE to tell to be at peace with myself. All I can do is adjust when. I've found out in my psych course that frist impressions are really important. And also, even if I talk about my past, but don't exhibit any of those traits, its like the difference between a child and an adult: they know I WAS that person, and its okay to fess up, but I'm not that person anymore. So, I'll need some time to make this all second nature. Lately, I had been avoiding conversations about ol' Dave. But those times are over. I am what I am as Popeye oft says. I can't and should not deny the past. But I have no desire to return to it either. So, here I am, who I am, and here because of who I was. I better get this straight before Dramatica, 'cause afterward will be too late!