MeghanIsMe

I was a mess yesterday, for some reason. In FB I wrote:

"Anxiety is worse today and tonight than it's been for quite a while. I felt anxious and almost panicky driving around for errands this morning.I have my first appointment regarding voice therapy tomorrow morning at 9:15 and am anxious about everything and am having trouble relaxing enough to try to sleep.
I don't know why I'm a mess right now, but I want to be at the bottom of a cuddle pile with people petting my hair and telling me I'm a good girl and I'm doing my best and it'll be ok.
Gonna snuggle Miriam and my shark friends and breath."

That was some particularly bad mental weather, but the storm has passed, leaving just the usual clouds at the horizon.

I had my first voice therapy appointment today. It was primarily getting a baseline for the therapist on where I am in my transition and with my voice. It was interesting to look at the quantitative analysis of my voice after doing a recording and ask questions about it. I understood about 75% of the answers.
She said would have been very surprised if I hadn't already done some voice training or practice. Which I have, through those Youtube voice training videos I've mentioned. I have a second appointment in the new year and I'm really excited to get started on the work.

My homework in the meantime is to think about things about my voice that I like. Which is hard. But she talked about doing so a lot more broadly and about more than technicalities or the actual sound. Things like how I like reading to people. Maybe once I've thought about that for while, I'll write about it here.

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I just watched anime in which a high school girl made a bunch of zombies literally explode by reciting Lady Chatterly's Lover to them from memory. Train to the End of the World keeps getting weirder and I love it.
I'm still watching anime while walking on the treadmill. But I did, in fact, give up on Hidamari Sketch. At least for now. It was just...really dull. Some people really love it, and that's valid. I do not.

Instead I watched a couple episodes of something called Stardust Telepath. There's a girl who is terribly shy and socially anxious and finds it really hard to talk to other people. Becuse she has so much trouble with other humans, she has always daydreamed of meeting an alien and making friends with them. Then a new girl starts in her class who says she is an alien, and it seems quite possible she is. The Earth girl still has a lot of trouble talking to her, but the alien girl can use "foreheadpathy" to understand the Earth girl's thoughts while touching their foreheads together. It's really sweet! I'm not sure if there's going to be any romance, but it definitely counts as yuri to me.

Then, for a couple days, Miriam wanted to watch something with me, so it's been 5 episodes of Train to the End of the World. A technology company was ready to unveil the new generation of cell phone technology: 7G! But when it was activated, it entirely reshaped the world, turning people into animals, or making them tiny, or infesting them with mushrooms, or making them zombies. It's also possible that the entire rest of the world outside of the train line between Agano and Ikebukuro no longer exists, but we're not really sure? Four girls from Agano get onboard a train and make their way toward Ikebukuro, where the 7G thing started, and to find one of their friends who left Agano after a fight. As I noted, it keeps getting weirder, and I kind of love it.

On the manga front, I started reading the first volume of Goodbye, My Rose Garden. In Victorian England, a Japanese woman, Hanako, goes to England to meet a novelist whose work she loves passionately. She spends a month visiting the publisher every day, and is always turned away. Then, an aristocrat named Alice who also loves the same novelist meets her there and hires her to work on her estate. In time, during a discussion of the novelist's work, Alice says that she coul arrange for Hanako to meet him. But in return, Hanako must do one thing for Alice: she must kill her.

I think Alice is the ostensibly male novelist, personally. I'm enjoying this so far and the art is beautiful.

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*

---

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 started reading Sweet Blue Flowers last night and was struck again (I felt the same way watching the anime) by how strongly I identify with Fumi. I compared that to how strongly I identify with a character who's sort of her polar opposite in some respects, Sayaka from Bloom Into You. It only took me a moment to make sense of that: Sayaka is who I want to be, and Fumi is who I was. (Who I am now is still a work in progress.)

I thought more about how, before I transitioned, it was incredibly rare for me to see a character in media who I saw myself in or wanted to be like. I can only think of two, and it wasn't the same with them. What I liked about them was that they were really smart and, in the case of one, Spock, was perceived to be unaffected by negative interactions with their peers and the difficult emotions that come from them. (The other was Albert Einstein, who I admired as a sort of embodiment of a concept of intelligence rather than as an actual person.)

This feeling of connection to a fictional character is novel to me and has made me think. I wonder what it would have been like to have a role-model like Sayaka (who in a way that feels a little embarrassing to express, kind of is that to me), or to really see myself in a character as I do with Fumi, in media when I was a kid or a teen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom_Into_You

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweet_Blue_Flowers

Rambles about the book I'm reading ("Regarding Saeki Sayaka: volume 1") and love:

At the start of the book I'm reading, the main character, Sayaka, is in (the Japanese equivalent of) elementary school. A girl she takes swimming lessons with keeps wanting to talk to her, and swim together with her, and make changes to the way she behaves so that Sayaka will like her more. Eventually, they have a moment where Sayaka realizes that this girl has a little kid sort of proto-crush on her. Sayaka's confused and terrified response to her own feelings in reciprocation is to decide that she must never see this girl again and to immediately quit her swimming lessons.

This sort of reminds me of a meme about a bunch of lesbians together at a party who are all talking about how they're looking for girlfriends, and then going home alone. When Sayaka is older, she'll fit right in!

In junior high (or the equivalent thereof, I think) another girl tells Sayaka she loves her and asks her to go out and her response is very different. It made me think about the ways I've felt when someone tells me they love me. I have a strong memory of the joy of Miriam telling me that for the first time. I have a strong memory of confusion and fear, like Sayaka but for very different reasons, when one of my ex's boyfriends told me that. I felt like I barely knew him and was being pushed into having a relationship with him and him saying that felt really wrong.

Sometimes people share a meme talking about how great it would be if we could tell people we don't have romantic feelings for that we love them: to be open about how important people are to us in non-romantic contexts. Intellectually, I think that would be wonderful. Emotionally, it's pretty scary. It's a big word that I don't feel like I'd know how to approach in that context. I think I'd either run away from it, or try to analyze it to death.

I don't really have a point. I just wanted to record thoughts and feelings I'm having about this book.

I empathize with Sayaka a lot. As a kid, she was better than her peers at everything she did. Not necessarily because she had more innate ability (though she might), but because she loved learning things and knowing things and improving skills. She took everything she was doing pretty seriously, unlike her peers, and took pride in being the best among kids her age at the things she did. As she got older, she realized that just putting effort into something doesn't mean you're going to be better than everyone else, or even most people, at it. I had to make that realization at some point, when I left elementary school or junior high where I could just ignore everything happening in class and still do fine on tests and assignments.

I think of all the characters in Bloom Into You and the related media, I feel the most kinship with Sayaka. I know she's going to have her heart broken by the end of this book and I'm kind of hurting for her already.

I bought a network media player at the thrift store and it does exactly what I wanted: I can play music and videos from my computer on the TV and/or receiver. Great!

So I tested it out by watching the beginning (which turned into the first half or so) of Project A-ko, which I haven't seen any of since before transitioning, and I had Thoughts about it.

This movie has some real problems in terms of the way gender is treated, and also problems with stereotyping of Black appearance (which I will admit I was *completely* oblivious to until Miriam pointed it out). I acknowledge those problems, but this isn't about that.

I first saw this movie in the edited, English version on TV - maybe it was the Sci-fi channel? - and have loved it ever since. It's so *bizarre*. It's so *surreal*, and those have been elements I've appreciated in media for as long as I can remember. But watching it again, now, it strikes me that this is, by at least some measures, yuri.

Years ago, when I was still with my ex, I bought a boxed set of Kashi Mashi at Best Buy. I loved that show for a lot of reasons, including several that were deeply personal. It was only a while after transitioning and learning what yuri media is and how much I love it that I realized that Kashi Mashi, one of the anime that is near the top of my list in terms of personal meaning and connection, is yuri. I've thought about the implications about this kind of media being what I connected with long before I realized I was something other than cis, and about how there were signs for a long time. I'd never thought about there being any media like that before then.

But I saw Project A-ko for the first time probably as long before I saw Kashi Mashi as my first viewing of Kashi Mashi was before the present. I think I was in high school. I loved it for reasons I was conscious of, but maybe there was a reason I wasn't conscious of: it's a story about two girls fighting over the love of a third. (And aliens, and super powers, and giant robots, but that's beside the point.) I remember one of my parents' friends commenting that the Western dub/edit had removed "lesbian subtext" that was there in the original version and wondering what that subtext was. Having seen the Japanese sub, there isn't subtext: there's text. This love for B-ko and jealousy of A-ko on the part of C-ko (Yes, they are more-or-less literally named "Girl A, Girl B, and Girl C) drives one of the primary conflicts of the entire movie. Women loving women are the people I identify with and feel attraction to, and maybe they always have been since before I figured that out.

I dunno. I don't have any huge thoughts or revelations about this all, but it's one of those things that I think I'm going to be thinking about for a long time.

I read the penultimate volume (number 7) of Bloom Into You last night, while lying in bed with Miriam and sharing the best parts. It's really good. One development in particular, and the writing surrounding it, was so good it made me cry. Part of that was because I feel personally connected to it as a trans person who has changed so much while my partner stood by me through all that change. I feel a little embarassed writing about it at length here, but it really meant a lot to me. So please feel free to skip on by if you're not interested in queer high-school relationship drama.

SPOILERS FOLLOW

BACKGROUND TO UNDERSTAND THE SCENE: Touko has spent her whole life trying to be a replacement for her "perfect" older sister who died in a car accident when Touko was in elementary school. She's presented a perfect façade to the world for so long that she doesn't know who she is anymore. She's scared that if someone likes her, or loves her, it's because of who she's pretending to be. She's scared that love is directed to a person as they are, and if that person changes that love might go away. She thinks she has been fooling her long-time friend Saeki with this façade. She has not: Saeki is one of two people who see through her. Saeki loves Touko anyway, but has never told her because she knew Touko would not react well. Plotful things have happened, Touko has grown as a person, and Saeki thinks this might finally be the time to talk to Touko about her feelings.

Saeki has confessed her feelings to Touko, telling her she knows exactly who she is and loves her anyway. Touko expresses fear, asking Saeki if she would still love her if Touko went through major changes in her life. Saeki concludes her response with:

"You know...love...
Doesn't mean 'I never want you to change'.
But I don't think it means 'I don't care if you change' either.
So I suppose it might mean...
'I believe that you'll always be the person I adore.'
A declaration of faith...perhaps."

That's the part that really got me. Right in my trans-girl heart.

...

Saeki has become one of my favorite characters in any yuri I've read. She's introduced maybe not quite as a villain, but as a cold person who doesn't really care about much except supporting and taking care of Touko. She's antagonistic toward Yuu, the other person who knows Touko as she really is, probabaly because she instinctively sees Yuu as a threat. But by this point, Yuu and Saeki both understand that Touko is really broken and want to help her grow as a person, and Touko's well-being becomes more important to Saeki than her unconfessed love for Touko.

And my heart breaks for Saeki because Touko gently declines her love, saying that she is already in love with someone else: Yuu. Saeki is crushed, and thinks about how long she's had these feelings and not said anything, and that because of her own choices, she lost the opportunity to be with Touko. But in reality, I don't think Touko could possibly have been prepared to hear Saeki's feelings if she hadn't developed in the ways she had because of her love for Yuu. [As a side note: this is yet another example of how cultural acceptance of open relationships might potentially make things better for everyone.]

It's the second time things have gone so poorly for Saeki through no fault of her own. In junior high (or the equivalent I guess), another girl asked her to go out and they spent the school year "dating" in whatever ways girls of that age do. Saeki was really attached, but they didn't see each other over the Summer. When the next semester started Saeki expected their relationship to continue, but the other girl basically said "We're both growing up. We're both girls: we have to stop pretending to date like this." She was crushed, and even transferred schools, from the all-girls one she was attending to a coed school, thinking that she had to find a boy. But she never did. The only other person she's had feelings for since was Touko.

There is a series of 3 "light novels" about Saeki. (Light novels are a Japanese format that originally arose from something like pulp magazines.) I've never bought anime/manga novel tie-ins before, but I have to know more about what happens to Saeki. I have to see her get a happy ending. I hurt for her.

I managed to get back to exercising today and watched two episodes of Citrus on the treadmill. I've found a series I can take off my to watch/to read list! This is way too rapey for me. Beyond that - and this is not talking about everyone who enjoys the show: it's valid to enjoy this kind of media - the people in comments handwaving it away because it's two women, among other reasons, is pretty disgusting and is so exemplary of the toxic nature of certain subsets of Japanese media fans, and of society in general.

Ella is confused by the sounds I make while watching voice training videos and it's pretty adorable. She's sitting in my lap and sometime she looks at my mouth or looks me in the eyes, I think trying to figure out if she should be paying attention or doing something.

A blanket we bought came with a blue satin ribbon as part of the packaging, so I tried to tie it around my neck in a big bow, thinking it would be cute. Then I looked in the mirror and it sort of looked like a necktie. O HAI THERE DYSPHORIA!

I'll just put that ribbon away now. *laughs*

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Yesterday's movie on the treadmill was Kase-san and Morning Glories. (Some spoilers here, in case you're concerned about that.)

The way the two of them communicated was so refreshing! They're not perfect, especially Yamada, but Yamada has never dated anyone before and is trying to figure that out. Kase, on the other hand, seems more experienced, and is caring and thoughtful.

Yamada is too cute for words. She may possibly be too cute and innocent for this world.
There are moments of drama, but they are resolved quickly rather than drawn out into long spans of will-they-won't-they as happens in other media like this I've consumed. One isn't necessarily better than the other, but Kase-san and Morning Glories was almost entirely relaxing, sweet, and positive, and sometimes that's a really great thing.

I was concerned by the choice Yamada makes at the end to go with Kase to Tokyo for university, but that was in part because I didn't quite understand what her original plan was. I don't know if she's ready, in terms of maturity and ability to think about things in the long term, to pack up her life and move somewhere entirely new and far from home to be with a girlfriend - that ended up not working out so well for me - but I also don't think it's as bad a choice as I was first worried it might be. And none of us start out having the experience to make these choices well: sometimes you just have to do them and see what happens, I think.

I would really like to read this manga.

*Adds it to her online wishlist

Wow, I have a lot of yuri in there... And a book about historic industrial architecture of the United States. Niche books on architecture are expensive. 🙁

Wait, what? That was the end? How was that the end? There was no end at the end!

No! It doesn't go to the end of the manga, and they're probably not making more! This is not ok. I am not ok. Nooooooo!

At least I have most of the manga already....

But this anime was beautiful! Even just in terms of pure aesthetics, it was gorgeous! And all together, the plot, the characters, the voice acting, I was so invested in this. We were just starting to see glimmers of Touko and Yuu connecting with themselves and each other as their real selves. Maybe this is how other people felt about Firefly not being renewed... I mean, I loved Firefly from the perspective of it being really novel sci-fi that was inclusive of some really interesting viewpoints on things like relationships, but I don't think it really hurt like this to not have more. This hurts.

https://www.sportskeeda.com/anime/bloom-into-you-season-2-why-sequel-currently-state-hiatus-explained

Introspection and realization from a conversation with Miriam yesterday evening:

I figured out some years ago that I've made a lot of the worst decisions in my life because I was trying to make them rationally and ignoring my emotions about them. However, reading Milk Morinaga's "Girlfriends" again led me to a realization about one such decision I made even further back in time than others that I've had that realization about. (Some spoilers about Girlfriends here, which are relevant to my realization.)
Girlfriends is a yuri love story about two high school girls, Mari and Akko. For quite a while, Mari is clearly crushing on Akko but has no idea that she is, despite patently obvious signs. She wants to spend more and more time with her. Going on a group date with other friends, Mari started crying at the thought that Akko might find a boyfriend and have less time for her. Together at Akko's home one evening, Mari was looking at her sleeping friend's face and thinking about how pretty her eyelashes were and, without thinking about it, leaned in and kissed her. (Which she was immediately ashamed of doing because of lack of consent. But she told Akko later, who brushed it off. "Is that all? Friends kiss all the time!") Mari learns that Akko had a boyfriend who she slept with the year before Mari met her, and was basically heartbroken at the thought that Akko might still have feelings for this boy, even while telling herself how her pain didn't make sense because she hadn't even met Akko a year ago and it's not like she and Akko were dating or something. And there's more.

Yet, they'd been close friends for something like a year before Mari finally had connected the dots, as she was rushing up the train station stairs to get to Akko as quickly as she could because the escalator was too slow, and realized that she has romantic feelings for Akko.

I was telling Miriam about this and saying that though from an outside perspective Mari's cluelessness is amazing, it actually kind of makes sense. I can imagine being a teen who has never even considered the possibility that girls could be attracted to other girls trying to figure out what all these weird feelings mean. It connects to experiences of my own. One is my complete failure to realize I was trans despite clues written in metaphorical giant blinking 500-point font letters. Miriam had her own experiences as a teen that show how much most humans want to interpret things in ways that fit their preexisting models: she had sexual dreams about women and logically concluded that she must have been a man in those dreams and that's why she was attracted to women in them. Being something other than straight wasn't a negative thing for her: it just didn't fit her mental model and she never even considered the possibility.

Now I've thought for some time that my own belief that I was completely gender-agnostic in terms of who I was attracted to was because I wanted to validate my own feelings of queerness somehow. Maybe I'd decided that this was my community, somehow, and being a boy who only liked girls didn't fit into that self-concept. I'd talked to Miriam about that before, and repeated my thoughts on it as we talked. Shortly after, while brushing my teeth, I realized that probably wasn't exactly it. "There's more to it!" I exclaimed, in what was likely a completely unintelligible attempt to vocalize through a mouth full of toothpaste.

I came back in the room and said that this was probably, in fact, another example of me making decisions that made fundamental alterations in the course of my life by analyzing them logically and ignoring how I actually felt. I went to my first fan convention by myself, without my parents, in 2002. I met a guy there who, not too long afterward, tried to get me into bed. I was completely unprepared for that, even at the age of 23, as a terribly shy person who hardly knew how to have friends, let alone how to engage with someone sexually, even less someone who I thought was of the same sex. But was I actually interested in men? In the days after, I thought about it and decided, rationally and logically, that it didn't make sense to exclude half the population of the planet from consideration as romantic or sexual partners merely because they were male. I couldn't think of any rational reason not to be bi, so I must be bi.

Friends, I like girls. I like girls a lot. I might just maybe possibly go for a masc person if there was something special about them. But there would really have to be something special about them. (I think my sweetie Erik fit into that category.) And while the shittiness of a lot of cis guys is, in fact, a rational reason to feel that way, it's a lot more than that, and it's stuff that I can't really explain rationally. I just really like girls. Kind of like I know I'm really a girl and it means everything to me to be one, even though I still have no real rational explanation for feeling that way and didn't figure it out for 35 years because it "didn't make sense."

So I think that I thought I was basically 50/50 bi for most of 20 years because *not* being bi didn't make any rational sense. It helped (or, rather, hurt) that I had no real idea how to relate to people that way as a boy so it's not like I was really learning about myself from experience. I didn't have anything making me question my mental model.