MeghanIsMe

I have read all of the small trove from my Saskatoon trip now and didn't dislike any of it! A brief write-up of them:

---How Do We Relationship: this was the other one on my wish list and it was a lot of fun. One reviewer said the two college women would really be far better as friends than lovers and I think that's probably true, but since this is fiction it might work out anyway. One of them is deeply introspective and thoughtful about her relationship-related decisions and the other...is not. This is a pretty hilarious dynamic at times. Also, as Miriam noted, it's great to see a lesbian relationship in media where one of the people involved is a real horn dog!

---Failed Princesses: This was probably my least favorite yuri I've read. I guess I'd give it a C? The high-school girl characters are a super popular girl and an otaku. The popular girl and her friends make fun of the otaku, but then she gets cheated on and dumped by her boyfriend and the otaku girl accidentally, by happenstance, comforts her. Popular girl starts wanting to spend time with Otaku girl, and by the end of the volume they're both kind of alienated from their friends because of it. I'd read more, but I'm not strongly attached to the characters and wouldn't go out of my way for it.

---Even Though We're Adults: I was not expecting to like this one. In fact, it was the only one I thought I might not read because it has themes of infidelity and that's pretty hard for me sometimes. But then I realized that it was by the mangaka who created Sweet Blue Flowers, which is really close to my heart. So I started reading it with an open mind.

Two women in their 30s meet at a bar and hook up. They both get pretty attached to each other. Akari has been with women who cheated on her in the past, and was even dumped for a man. Ayano is married to a man, has never been with a woman, and is only now realizing that she's probably a lesbian. Just like Sweet Blue Flowers, there is a lot of relationship drama between characters who are doing their best to communicate and who care about each other, but who can't help doing things that hurt each other sometimes. (Part of why this kind of story really gets to me is because of distorted echoes of my relationship with my ex-wife.)

The lack of drama based on dishonesty and lack of communication in yuri (at least the yuri I've read) is a deep breath of fresh air compared to Western romance, and is the only reason I can manage reading stories like this. Within the first volume, Ayano has already started talking to her husband about her feelings for Akari, and they're trying to to figure out what to do but are kind of lost. Meanwhile, Akari is trying to deal with her fear of being a fling, her anger at being misled, and her grief and frustration that she keeps ending up in relationships with women for whom she becomes an afterthought. The manga has made me feel sympathy for every one of these characters, and Takako Shimura's artwork is expressive and emotional. This one might just tear my heart out, and I very much want to read the rest. In measured doses.

---Still Sick: Like Failed Princesses, this one is kind of on my third tier list. Two businesswomen work in the same office. One is a girls' love otaku who secretly draws yuri doujinshi (amateur manga) that she sells at conventions. The other, we find out later, was a professional manga artist who give up on her art for complicated personal reasons. The plot is driven by introspective angst mixed with humor that often stems from in-jokes about manga creation and yuri fandom. I like it and would read more: there were moments that had me laughing out loud, and I feel sympathy, though not empathy, for each woman in the dyad. But it's not high on my buy list.

---A side-note: because I loved what I've seen of Sweet Blue Flowers so much, and because I think I'm going to love Even Though We're Adults, I looked to see what else Takako Shimura has done. The work she's best known for is something called Wandering Son. The title didn't sound like my kind of thing, but I looked up a description.

Oh. Oh wow. It's about a trans girl. It's about a trans girl, and it's by someone who has already created other characters I connected with and felt strong feelings for. It's about a trans girl, and I want so *very* much to read this.

And it turns out that the English publication by Fantagraphics stopped halfway through the run, so the rest isn't available in a professional English translation. Also, the first English volumes are out of print and about $100 a piece, because of course they are *sighs*

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I'm toying with the idea of creating a spreadsheet for all the yuri I've read or watched, with info about their setting, the genre, the plot, whether they're comedy or drama or both, how fluffy they are, and, of course, whether they visit the aquarium! Could be fun.

In the meantime, further evidence that I'm in the teenage girl phase of my transition: here's my wall of yuri. I have a few more things I want to find art of to put up there. It started when I decided to print out all of Sheep Princess in Wolf's Clothing to put in a binder and I misprinted a couple sheets so I put them on the wall. But then they looked kind of lonely by themselves...

I had to print and sign a form for this job application. It's the first time I'm writing an official business-type signature with my actual name and I'm kind of excited about it to a slightly embarrassing extent. *happy puppy-girl noises*

(I like the sort of symmetry of the connected loops of the "g" and "h" next to each other like that...)

Also, I created this meme about my HRT experience for a transfem shitposting group. It got over 60 reacts, so I guess it was good!

Lots of girls who thought they were only attracted to women start HRT and find that they're interested in men. I always thought I was basically 50/50 bi/pan. Now, though, I'm leaning more like 70-80 percent toward women. I've realized that one reason I've always liked yuri media so much is that, without really acknowledging it, I was envious of the experiences of the women in that anime and manga.

A friend commented that he's heard the same thing (about being envious of the experiences of women in such media) from two other women who've transitioned and it's definitely a thing! I said:

It's not yuri, but my favorite manga is probably Azumanga Daioh, which is just a slice of life comic about a group of high school girls who are friends and their daily lives. I love it so much that I've never read the last few pages because I kind of don't want it to end, you know? I wish I could have had a high school experience like that.

For a few days, I was feeling, paradoxically, both less mentally stable than usual and more able to be functional and productive than usual. Random crying and panic attacks were more frequent (once, while working in the kitchen, I ended up leaning against the refrigerator and crying with absolutely no idea why), but I also cleaned and organized and made decent food more than usual and made progress on the insurance spreadsheet. I almost felt like the instability and productivity were going together somehow: like I was making some kind of subconscious progress.

But, as Christmas and the new year got closer, I kept the mental instability but kind of lost the improved ability to do useful things. There's a lot of anixety and depression connected to this holiday span. Even though I've been able to play some games online with family and a friend, and got to talk to my brothers especially more than I have in a long time, I still feel terribly lonely and isolated here.

A lot of people are expressing optimism about the end of the old year and the start of the new, but after the last three years being so awful, it's hard to feel any of that. Instead, I feel apprehension. Dread, even, sometimes. It's a bit like when I'm feeling really depressed and the idea of going to bed is off-putting because it means I just have to wake up and deal with yet another day. The year is ending, and it means I just have to deal with yet another year of pandemic-caused isolation, being thousands of miles away from most of the people I care about, and now trying to navigate life as a transwoman.

Don't get me wrong: realizing I'm a woman and doing things to affirm that has been, without question, the biggest source of joy for me in the last year or two. But just going out and doing things - anything - in public as a trans person is mentally taxing, and sometimes I just don't have the spare capacity for it.

Hoping that the new year is going to be wonderful, or even just better, is too big a chunk of optimism for me right now, I guess. Instead, I'm going to hope that, now that the holiday stuff is done and I'm not actively missing people and a former way of life so sharply, I can get back to feeling like maybe I'm making a little bit of progress with the panic, anxiety, and depression and maybe becoming a more functional human being.

And maybe I'll manage to keep doing things online with family and friends. That would be really nice.

It's another of my popular, audience-grabbing walls of text! This time with a content warning for violence against women, transphobia, racism and racist lyrics, and cultural analysis. You won't be able to put it down! ('Cause it's not a physical object! HA!)

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One of the CDs I grabbed for my trip to Posi's place yesterday was The Beatles'* Rubber Soul. One song on that album ("In My Life") reminisces about all the "places and things" and "friends and lovers" the singer has known through his life; how he will always hold them in great affection even as he loves his current partner more than any of them. I love the recognition that there is room in the heart for tender feelings that stretch beyond a single person and a single time. It's really sweet.

Another song ("Run For Your Life") threatens violence against the narrator's partner, telling her she'd "better run for your life if you can little girl," and he'd rather see her dead than with another man. Musical whiplash in one album!

I thought about the context of those two songs as part of the same greater creative work, and what I know about the time that created them, and similar contemporary music (see Jimi Hendrix singing "Hey Joe",), and in the end I could only think to myself, "culture is really complicated."

(And that's not the only such instance in the Beatles' oeuvre. Whenever I hear a snippet of the Beatles' "Getting Better", I think of Lennon singing:

"I used to be cruel to my woman
I beat her and kept her apart
From the things that she loved
Man I was mean
But I'm changing my scene
And I'm doing the best that I can."

But it still worked wonderfully for a GE advertising campaign a while ago because it's such a happy, upbeat, classic song, right!?)

Anyway, this morning, listening to a David Byrne album on the way to work, I heard "Now I'm Your Mom," a potentially offensive song from the perspective of a trans woman, and thought about Lou Reed.

A few months ago at work, Lou Reed came up as a topic of conversation between myself and two co-workers. I think we were talking about Walk on the Wild Side because it had come up in a public to-do about potential transphobia in its mention of Holly Woodlawn:

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"Holly came from Miami F.L.A.
Hitch-hiked her way across the U.S.A.
Plucked her eyebrows on the way
Shaved her legs and then he was a she..."
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The song was played at a college-related event and some students felt this was inappropriate because it minimized and/or ridiculed the process of gender transitioning. But Reed, and probably the bulk of listeners who understood the context, saw the whole song as a love letter to the weirdos and freaks of New York in general, and the acquaintances of Andy Warhol in particular. “Paul Morrissey made me a star," said Woodlawn, "but Lou Reed made me immortal.”

Because it's relevant, one coworker, 1, is a Black woman. As we talked about "Walk on the Wild Side," the other coworker, 2, clearly felt awkward about explaining why Walk on the Wild Side was racially insensitive. I personally didn't feel like a line referring to "colored girls" singing was out of line as a historical reference, so I quoted the line for 1 so she wasn't sitting in information limbo while we tiptoed around it. Later, when just 1 and I were talking, she pointed me at lyrics she'd found when reading up on Lou Reed. From I Wanna Be Black:

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"I want to be black
Have natural rhythm
Shoot twenty feet of jism..."

"Have a girlfriend named Samantha
And have a stable of foxy whores..."
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And that's leaving out a lot of other lines that would be, to put it mildly, inappropriate in a present-day context.

I think I said something like "Wow. That's really not ok." Because there wasn't really anything else to be said about that at that point. How do you understand and respond to something like that? Later, I looked around the internet to get an understanding of the context and to help me relate the song to the artist and his thoughts and intentions. I'm not going to try to contextualize it here because it's still rather outside my experience and understanding.

Sometimes people's reactions to problematic behavior on the part of content creators means is to believe that all of the content produced by that creator is indelibly stained by their thoughts and words and must be forever shunned. (Of course forever is a short time these days, but that's a tangent.) Whose work could we actually appreciate then, other than perhaps Fred Rogers?

I think there are things that shouldn't be part of the popular culture of TV, radio, and other such media. Things like Walk on the Wild Side and - another piece of media I haven't touched on here - Baby It's Cold Outside for instance. For a significant portion of people who hear them, they exist outside of their context and, in that way, are perfectly legitimate targets of serious criticism**. I still think they can be consciously enjoyed without inherently accepting racism or domestic violence.

Is such media categorically different from Reed's "I Wanna Be Black" or the Beatles "Run For Your Life"? If so, what differentiates them? If not, where is the line between 'acceptable in context' and 'simply unacceptable?'

And lastly, should I just shut the hell up and enjoy music? I guess that question is basically moot though. It's funny how strongly a question I was asked elsewhere on Facebook recently has stuck with me lately.

"Why do you care so much about this?"

How could I not? How could I *possibly* not?

--Footnotes

*I almost feel like Beatles albums don't even need to be introduced as such because everyone knows the names, but that's never really been true, and becomes less so as time passes.

**Meaning is created from, and exists entirely in, context. See the use of the word queer, for instance. If a song is felt to be misogynist or racist, then in a very real and important way, it *is*. To say otherwise; to say "if you knew the context you'd understand and your opinion is not valid" is a form of cultural elitism. But it's not *always* misogynist or racist. Or always *and* not always? Some kind of quantum state of...what? Problematicness? Culture is hard.