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The Lady of Shalott

The Tennyson poem, The Lady of Shalott , has always tugged at my soul . I encountered it while in school, and, at about the same time, I heard Loreena McKinnet’s musical rendition of the poem. The song haunted me, and the The Lady frequently well s up in my imagination , unbidden. Her story is one of tragedy and triumph. She lives comfortably in a tower overlooking Camelot with but one restriction. She is cursed that if she ever looks directly upon Camelot, she will die. While t he curse stops her from traveling there, she can still indirectly watch the city. She sets a mirror against the wall opposite her tower window, so she can sit before it and look at the reflection of the magnificent bustling city. She fills the room with tapestries, woven with the images she spies through the mirror. Surrounded by images from a life that she is barred from, she eventually decides to risk the curse for a chance to live her life rather than watch ing others live theirs. This is her moment of v
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How Coloring a Tree Landed Me in the Doctor's Office

My mom flipped through the small ring-bound book and pointed to one of the pages. “What number is that?” “Uh, 7?” I guessed. “Are you sure?” she asked, her brow furrowing. “What about this one?” She flipped to another page and showed it to me. I glanced at the disk of differently sized colorful bubbles. “There’s nothing in that one,” I said with confidence. While waiting for the doctor to call us into the exam area, my mother and I continued perusing the book. Some of the colorful bubble pictures had numbers in them. In one, a seven made of blue disks stood out against a background of green disks. In another, a red four amidst purple bubbles. Other pages were just fields of different shades of the same color with no recognizable pattern. My mother was clearly flustered by my answers. She stopped at one of the numberless pages. “You really don’t see anything there?” “Nope.” “It’s a three, Daniel.” “What?” “There’s a 3 right there. It’s green. You can’t see it?” she asked, in

What Your Trans Friends Hear When J.K. Opens Her Mouth

Hi, friends. This post breaks the usual theme of my blog. I'm writing to let you all know that I contributed a guest post to another blog. The guest post started as a Facebook comment in a thread discussing J.K. Rowling's stance on trans rights, and the FB friend whose page it was invited me to expand what I wrote into something he could put on his blog. Six hours of writing later, I ended up with a monstrous piece of writing that could have served as a chapter in a book on the delinquency of Rowling.  He was kind enough to publish it, despite the length. The post is here:  What Your Trans Friends Hear When J.K. Opens Her Mouth The piece goes into detail regarding the repercussions of two specific aspects of Rowling's views on transgender people. I go over the consequences associated with excluding trans women from women's spaces and some of the consequences for spreading the myth of transness as a social contagion in young people. I wrote that piece for people who do n

Unplugging From Gender

 “That’s ugly dude. You gotta shave.” I put my hand over my chin and blushed as the other boy laughed. “Why do you have that? Just shave it off,” he said, rubbing his chin and then pointing to mine. “I don’t know,” I said, dropping my eyes. “Leave me alone.” “Jeez,” he muttered as I stormed off to class. I gingerly touched the single, inch-long hair coming off my chin and felt nauseous. I had been putting off asking my dad how to shave. For the last few months, little hairs had started coming out of my face. I had tugged at the longest one, thinking that maybe a could pull it out. It hurt terribly, so instead I tried to ignore it. I could not ignore it. The thick dark hairs were there every time I looked in the mirror. There were only maybe 5 very noticeable ones, but lighter fuzz was beginning to cover my jaw like mold growing out of an old loaf of bread. I stared at them in the mirror, and, with a sense of horror in my gut, I touched one of those hairs just enough to feel resis

How Do I Look?

“Hey, Juniper! It’s good to see you!” I gave Ollie a hug and smiled up at him. It had been months since I had seen him, and we were finally able to make a lunch hangout work. We sat, and I tucked a lock of hair behind my ear. “Tell me about what’s going on with you? How’s Amy doing?” I asked. “She’s doing well. Actually, great! We’re expecting a baby this spring!” “Congratulations!” I inquired about how the pregnancy was going, and then we chatted about work. Ollie and I are both data scientists. We used to work together, spending a lot of the day talking about everything from politics to machine learning algorithms. Back then I didn’t have boobs. If I had, our work relationship might have been regarded with suspicion that it was more than it was. It wasn’t and wouldn’t be. After transitioning, I staked out a site in the gay camp, and I can’t imagine abandoning it. On the other hand, I wasn’t helping with the potential optics problem. I had made myself up as cute as I could manage. My