By the way, they finally updated Hell's Kitchen. It's been a few years since I put it on hold, and most of the update happened a couple of weeks ago. I think they have all but the 3 last chapters up now. Maybe whenever I pick it up again, and read to that point, they'll already have the last 3 up. It's a fun one, and some of the dishes are drool worthy. Dogma is training Satoru to be the perfect chef. After his training, Satoru's soul will be eaten by Dogma, who's a demon. Akaya Akashiya Ayakashi no (Of the Red, the Light, and Ayakashi) had a massive update, too. That's been on hold for me a lot longer. They have almost all of that up now. It's a really beautiful manga. That'd be cool to get back too, as well.
The weather calendar has crawling lightning that was shot from Australia during the monsoon season. It's cool looking. Looks like fingers of lightning stretching across the clouds. The other smaller pics are of supercell clouds and tornadoes.
The month-long holidays for February are: Canned Food Month, National Cherry Month, National Hot Breakfast Month, Potato Lovers Month. Some are for important causes, some are to make you appreciate things you may take for granted, and some are just for fun. I love cherries and potatoes! My kind of month.
The Tu B'Shevat (New Year for the Trees) seder didn't actually happen. I even made a list of all the fruit and nuts we needed. I went through the seder with my mom's haggadah, somewhat to 'practice' it without the drinks and food. I noticed the wording was really odd. Even the prayers weren't written out in Hebrew, when they normally would. It's from online roughly 16 years ago. So, I looked it up. Turns out this particular version isn't online anymore. However, it was an adaptation of another one. The original uses YHWH instead of Adonai or Hashem. Also, using that acronym is usually a red flag that it's not Jewish. Usually a Christian thing. If you're going to actually use the first letters of each letter in the actual word, it'd make more since to use YHVH. It's yud hey vav hey. There is no W. We don't know what G-d's name actually is, so we use attributes, like Hashem, which means The Name. The letters written down are not actually said that way. It's like a placeholder. So, that makes me wonder...The transliterations aren't quite right either. I did find a different one that was Reform based online, and it seemed a lot better. Seemed more kosher, so to speak. Might use that if I do it next year.
Maybe we can invite them to our Passover seder, instead. Last year, it was just me. Hopefully, there won't be too many people that end up coming to that. Dad told me if they had gone it'd be 3 people and possibly their partners coming over. So, it'd be roughly 8 people altogether. That's more than I'm used to for ours. I guess it just means more food and people might have to share the haggadahs. Oh, and either adding the extension (I think it's called a leaf?) to the dining table or putting a card table at the end. Passover starts at the very end of March this year.
At the end of this month, I have a haircut. It's apparently been exactly year this month. Last year, I tried their over-hyped Deva cut. I thought I liked it at first, but after a couple of weeks the way it was cut seemed so...off. It started to look a bit different, too. Deva cut is apparently supposed to be the best one for curly/wavy hair. I loved the style that one of their stylists gave me after 7 years without having a haircut. (I was growing it out in between.) She actually made me fall in love with it. Others have really liked it, too. I think I had her roughly 2 1/2 years ago, and the time before that. I just wanted to see how the Deva cut was last time, and she's not trained for it. I'm glad I at least tried it out.
Another thing I've been noticing is I think either lialda or azathioprine has messed with my hair a bit. I know when I started aza., my hair started to fall out. (I'm not taking this anymore, but it can stay in the system for a while afterwards.) I'm noticing lately that I'm getting a lot of white hairs. I started getting white hairs when I was about 16, but I'd pluck them out when I saw them. They didn't show up often. Now, a lot of them seem to be suddenly sprouting up. I know both meds can mess with hair, but this is weird. Those hairs aren't even the same texture as the rest of my hair. I think it's cool that it seems I'll eventually have all white hair, but I don't want that now. I'm iffy about dying my hair, since I've always liked my hair color. If I ever do dye it, I'd probably have a pro do it and have the top layer dark green and bottom layer dark purple. Green, since it's in both the aro and agender flags. Purple, since it's in the ace flag. That might have an interesting effect. I doubt I'd do this anytime soon.
The 18th through the 25th will be Aromantic Spectrum Awareness Week. It's usually the week after Valentine's Day, which is fitting. I might put an aro filter on facebook sooner, though. Maybe I'll bring up what aro means again on there. There might be articles I can share, and/or I could do some sort of art thing for it. It's not just for the aromantics, but also the 'grey' area or aromantic spectrum between that and alloromantics. Alloromantics are those who do experience romantic attraction. Sometimes we use allo for short. (Same thing with aces calling others allosexual, they'll use allo.) That community online seems newer than the ace one. There have always been aros, though. They're trying to separate themselves from the ace community, since it's a different thing. Also, most aros are actually allosexual. It's odd when you're both. I might go into more again on here during that week.
I've been feeling sick for the last few weeks. It doesn't seem as bad as the flu, but like a mild cold. I've also had a lot of pain on my side that eases every other day and then comes back with more intensity. Another reason why I think I'm flaring again. On top of that, I've had a somewhat different type of extremely sharp pain all over my abdomen. It'll suddenly happen, and I have a hard time walking or doing anything while it's happening. That's happened at the grocery store a couple of times. I end up trying to walk around slowly, hunched over a bit, and clutching my gut. It feels like my gut's super heavy when it happens. Luckily, this type of pain doesn't last too long. However, I've noticed it has been happening more often. The first couple of times I thought maybe it was just really awful gas. Then, I didn't pass much of that later and it's gone before that usually. It doesn't seem like it's really related. This and that side pain are starting to scare me a bit. I don't want to go to the hospital (or even Urgent Care), because it feels like they won't believe me. Also, I don't have a fever and I'm not throwing up. I don't know...I suppose if it got much worse I might go.
Last week, the local trans group had a potluck and movie meeting. We brought chicken strips and potato wedges. It was basically the only thing I could fill up on there. There was a 7-layer dip with tortilla chips (both of which I don't eat); a cheese, olives, and meat platter with crackers (couldn't have the meat); and I think one other thing. There was soda, and even though I don't usually drink it, I had some. The movie was the Gender Revolution National Geograhic documentary with Katie Couric. I swear we've had it for group movie night before. I was watching it a little differently now, and didn't have my 'blinders' on. I didn't realize I was agender when we saw it last. Anyways, there were a lot problematic things in it. It was a lot better done than most, but still needed a lot of improvement. The main focus was on binary trans people. Which, ok, it's good to have some focus on them, but what about enbies?
Also, they briefly showed and mentioned 'gender non-binary'. This is really irritating to the community, as I found out through bringing it up a while before in the enby fb group I'm in (I didn't exactly know why it irritated me so much so I asked them), and seeing articles on it. Would people say gender transgender? How about gender woman or gender man? That's how weird and awkward it is for us. Now, people definitely can say non-binary gender(s). That makes sense. Agender is a non-binary gender, genderfluid is a non-binary gender, etc.
They didn't bring up genderqueer either. There's some misunderstanding with this even in that enby group. Genderqueer was the original name of the community. Some people had issues with using the word 'queer' (totally understandable), so they came up with non-binary. They mean the exact same thing besides that. The creator of the name genderqueer (they also created the flag for it), said this too. Some people like both, like me, and others go with one or the other. I just say/write enby more, because it's seems more fun. The shortened form of genderqueer is GQ. Not as cutesy, and it sounds like something else. I think there's a magazine called GQ?
Katie also interviewed 2 trans women. One that was in her 70s and the other in her 20s. The older one was really stuck on the binary. Painfully so. The other one was a lot more 'loose' about the binary. She brought up that gender is really a spectrum, and some people aren't just a man or a woman. That was good to see. The worst part was when the older one said life wouldn't have meaning if there wasn't a binary system...She'd rather die. As an enby this was disturbing. Luckily the younger one was appalled by it. Apparently, she blew both Katie's and the older one's mind. Why does it have to be so out there for people?
I also thought it was odd when Katie kept saying that it was all a lot to get her head around. It's so confusing, apparently. This was mainly with the binary trans and intersex people. Why is it confusing? I think people are actually more scared than confused, but they don't want to admit it. I kind of get being a little confused by the concept of being non-binary. They only touched on enbies once really. Still...It seemed rude at times.
Oh, one of their 'experts' saying the 'opposite gender' was lovely. I don't know if it was to dumb it down or something, but it wasn't cool. There is no 'opposite'. It's a very binary and somewhat harmful view.
At an artsy shop downtown on Sunday, the owner was really nice and talkative. Eventually, he stopped and looked at both Dad and I, and said he was assuming that both of us were ladies and asked if that were true. So, to my parent it seemed both affirming and clocking her. She said yes to it. I had a longer pause. Do I tell him the truth that I'm neither a lady nor a guy? Or, do I politely nod and say yes? I thought that I didn't really want to get into it, and did the latter. But, it felt really wrong. The other thing is do I want to cater to cis people to make them feel comfortable and not awkward? Or, do I want to be unapologetically me and possibly have to explain it? Even though he was a very nice guy, why should I have to hide it? He misgendered me this way, and I let him...It feels like a weird internal struggle. I'm actually leaning more towards using they/them, but am ok with she/her still. With everything else, like 'lady' or 'woman', I have more issues with. I want to be more out, but even if I had merch like t-shirts relating to agender (if it even had that word), people would most likely not know what it meant. If I'm more out, I could educate people more, and be happier about it too.
Also, why do people have to assume someone's a certain gender? Wouldn't it be great if everyone was treated truly equally? Before people know what pronouns someone uses or other gendered things, wouldn't it just be easier for everyone to use neutral pronouns and language? Like, using they/them for pronouns. Instead of things like: lady, woman, girl; or guy, man, boy, etc.; why not: person, human, being, pal, friend, gentlefolk, etc. So many other options! Cool if someone tells you to use she/her pronouns and they are a woman. Refer to them with those pronouns and gendered language. Same with men with he/him and other gendered language for them. It's not erasing people's gender. Breaking a binary system would actually benefit everyone. People could explore their gender more deeply, as well. It would be a beautiful thing. More people would probably realize they're enby, which I think some people would be scared of that idea. They want to live in their perfect little boxes. A world where everything is black and white, and they don't have to think much about who they really are. It's the same thing with sexual orientation. They don't want to know there are more 'options' than gay or straight. They might realize bi is a thing, but nothing more.
I brought up being misgendered and essentially being frustrated about the binary on the enby fb group. The only comment I had was someone who was obviously very angry. I don't think at me. Just someone who's perpetually angry at cis and binary people, I guess? They started off by saying they were frustrated too and agreed with me. Then, it got weird. Saying I shouldn't expect people to be accepting, the gender revolution is afoot, I have to have a hand in it, etc. It was bizarre. At first, I thought I was overreacting in thinking it was weird and uncalled for. But, the more I thought about it, the more it was unsettling. This person was older than me, and seemed to have been 'battling' for a long time. Why can't I assume people will accept me? Why do I have to do something about it? There are people who are willing to do that stuff. I'm really not. I just want to be openly me. There are also safety issues. Yet, I was told recently that even my existence is radical politically. That I'm inherently an activist just for existing. I don't know if I like that. Anyways, I decided to block the angry older person. I don't need that drama. I have been getting a lot of reactions from people. Mainly sad and love ones. I think it's up to 16 of those. The most reactions I've had on any post I've posted in that group. So, obviously I'm resonating with people.
I've been off and on with writing Alliance 3 lately. Mainly because of feeling so sick. I couldn't focus on it much. I know I'm at least close to chapter 4. It took me a while to think of a name of one of the 'villains' in the story. I didn't want it to sound 'evil'. However, I did want it to be interesting. I often go by meanings of names. Sometimes I'll translate a word (like 'song') into multiple languages, and either pick what seems more interesting or jumble them up. I have come up with some cool combos this way. I chose an actual first name that's water based. It's a rare name, though. His last name is a scientific name of a poisonous flower. Sounds cool and the flower is beautiful, but it's extremely deadly. Also, turned out to be the name of a Greek G-d, who seems to have a similar personality. So, it worked out better than I expected. Interestingly, 2 other recent characters have flower based names.
I'm almost done with the fish section of the cookbook. She had a lot that were from an unnamed grocery store. They must be from the late 70's or early 80's. Some sound really good. Some of them are microwave recipes. Those sound interesting, easier, and quick.
I've also been finding more interesting things through Pinterest. One pin was a ramen 'cheat sheet'. It seems like it's for a more traditional type of ramen. You pick different ingredients for each part, and they show you the basics of cooking it all and plating it. I tried it out. My protein was chicken. Aromatics: garlic, dried onions. Vegetables: spinach, carrots. Broth: shoyu (soy sauce) based. It was one of the options they suggested, and I based it off of recipes I saw online. It was chicken broth, dashi (fish broth), soy sauce, and rice vinegar. Seasonings: 7-spice, sweet paprika, a dash of salt, pepper, and margarine. They suggested curry powder, but I couldn't find it, so I used paprika. They suggested butter (I use margarine in place of butter usually) to make it a richer tasting broth. Garnish: chives. They also suggested different types of ramen. I just used the instant kind. Turned out amazing! It's a nifty little template. Might use different combos in the future. Definitely felt more like a meal than I would normally do. Normally, as a soup, I just use chicken broth and the ramen. I never use the flavor packets.
I also found a pin on making your own flavored salt. That was a cool idea. Another one's on making your own flavored butter. Found quite a lot with making salad dressings. Some with different marinade ideas. Figuring out the right onions or the right apples for recipes pins. Templates for making soups. With a lot of this stuff they can help you create your own dishes. That's pretty awesome! Funny and relatable colitis-based ones. There are pins that have tips on binding. As well as some on top surgery. Lots of aro, ace, and agender based stuff, too. I'm surprised with what I've found on there. I was thinking in the past about sharing some of these on fb. Not sure what stopped me. I know I posted one thing. I think it was on queerplatonic relationships. Maybe I was nervous that it was too odd to share after I did so? Maybe I'll get to that again soon.
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