Blood

If you're someone who's likely to be disturbed by blood, menstruation, sex or complicated questions about gender, it would probably be better not to read this one. Have a good day.

An aggravating feeling of helpless rage at the smugness of an authority that doesn't give a damn about anything I say and has power over me through the very nature of the systems of which our world is built, the only allies against it very far away and unable to intervene to help me in my present, and for all I know unable or too busy to intervene before I run out of time and die.

Seems familiar.

I have, for the last hour or so, been holding an internalized mental argument... with an anthropomorphic personification of human evolution. And feeling increasingly like a sulky, powerless teenager under its authority.

-----

I woke up this morning covered in blood, soaked through the sheet under me, into the mattress, all over my loins and thighs. Grumbled to my feet and wrapped in a towel and tried to get to the bathroom to clean off without leaving drops of blood on the hall carpet. I had made my regular preparations for my period, it's not like this came out of nowhere and I wasn't expecting anything. But what the hell? Usually those steps are enough.

Wash my legs, empty my cup, clean the little drops off the bathroom floor (at least that just wipes clean) and come back to my room to strip my bloody sheet off my bed in a cold room stinking richly of copper and rust. Laundry earlier than expected, then. I don't have any spares. Sad regret at not following through on my thought to buy another mattress protector when I started using the first one I bought as a blanket against the growing cold followed me to school. I can't expect the next unknown tenant to be willing to sleep on a bloodstained bed, so it's only fair after this to put some of my deposit towards replacing the mattress, which is a punch to my sensitive budget awareness. I know better than this, and the cost of buying the second mattress protector would be so much less. But I just hadn't gotten around to it. Too many other priorities too intensely felt. Too late now.

Well, at least I did put myself to bed early and got what should be a reasonable enough amount of sleep to function well at school. But in class, it took not only an energy drink but the engagement of an actual exercise to perform to keep me from repeatedly closing my eyes and realizing after a while that I hadn't opened them and was paying more attention to my desire for more sleep than the lecture. On the upside, I guess, it's familiar material that was covered by my Cost Accounting class at Fanshawe, and didn't require much mental presence to use as review rather than new learning.

And while I sat in class, warmth leaked into my underwear and jeans in little blossoms. I could feel it. What the hell, seriously? It's only a half hour walk, and only an hour of class. School bathroom, emptied my cup again and looked over the damage. Mhm. Stained the patches on my jeans. Well, that's fresh enough it might wash out if I deal with it before it dries. And if not, well, I was kind of planning on re-patching them anyway. Damn, though. I don't usually have heavy periods, and this is insanely fast. One of my old friends used to tell me about how heavy her periods usually are, and I was glad I didn't have to deal with it. This sounds like what she told me. I don't think it's a medical emergency, but it's really weird for me.

Feeling exhausted, scarcely better than on Monday when I hadn't slept at all, after a morning headache I attributed to dehydration from blood loss (and seemed to be validated, since drinking lots of water really helped). I felt and feel drained in a way that seems profoundly more literal than usual, and responded as I had on Monday by returning home to rest, frustrated intensely at the impact on my attendance in classes.

As I walked, I wondered why my body was investing so much into conception this month, such that it was leaving me deprived of strength for other things, like actually being restored by sleep and being awake in class. I reflected that all the masculinity and determination I pulled up yesterday and that wonderful feeling of swagger and confidence just couldn't seem to be supported on a body spending so much of its strength to wash out and replenish a womb, which was not made for battle. I felt I would like to be able to talk to the part of me that regulated that and ask it what the deal was, why the investment, and if I could have some kind of warning if this was going to happen again.

Well, I hadn't been expecting this to develop, but my imagination is vibrant and has a lot of material to draw from.

The personification looks back at me with patronizing eyes.

"You get all pumped up on passion and infatuation and don't expect to conceive. Just like you, Upstart Consciousness, thinking you run everything now, decide everything. I made those feelings, and getting you pregnant is what I made them for.

"You can co-opt the feelings, sure, like you've harnessed everything else. Do what you like, Upstart. I can't and won't stop you. But when you take the infrastructure I spent twenty years building into your very flesh, and millions in practicing, and you try to make something completely different out of it, don't come complaining to me that my lust, my affection and instincts of family-forming and the elation of compatibility that I gave you have side-effects that mess up pieces of whatever weird deviating program you're trying to build with them. De-bug your own mess.

"Silly Upstart. Always wanting the best of everything, without its costs.

"I specialized you to be a garden, rich and fertile. You don't want to plant anything there, fine. But this blood is not meant for you, Upstart Consciousness. It was meant for the children you refuse to have."

And I stare and sit and sulk, enraged at the determinism of my weave and my flesh to anything other than my will. An authority I have no greater established authority to appeal to for overturn. I wonder to myself whether this personification of the very manufacture of me gets its attitude of distant, smug and hateful authority from my mother (the flesh person from whom I directly descend, rather than the long process of descent which is no less my mother), or maybe the other way around. Was this always a part of it? Was this far more a part of my utter intolerance for her than I ever suspected, a hatred that I was built with a body made for childbearing when I wanted to fight and lead?

Confusion and despair and uncertainty. There are times, although as befits the bitter teenager feeling, I may resentfully resist admitting it at the moment, when that purpose flows through me red and alluring. I feel the heat of it and my body's response. Lust craves in me pointedly to be sewn and swollen with fertility, but I revolt and hold my ideals against the impulse, valuing quality of life over quantity and understanding them to be in conflict. I will side with quality, no matter what my biology has to say about it. But deep in my sex drive, I know it is there in all of my femaleness.

Do I hate that? Is that why all of sex seems like rape to me sometimes, in that vague and imprecise close-but-not-quite way? That the ways in which my body is designed to enjoy it seem like an imposition to me, a drug woven into my flesh, a manipulation I cannot escape and a tool to subvert me as an individual, as Upstart Consciousness which thinks that Consciousness ought to rule the world; like the systems of pleasure exist to demur me and not just me specifically, not just Serp, but "me", the concept of being an individual and having self-determination, demur "me" to submit my time and life energy to being part of the biological process, a cog in the machine of flesh and procreation. A stitch in the fabric of generations, to bond and spread its spoor and die and be eaten, digested by plants and returned to the newborns in their day as fruit.

I want more for myself, for all selves as my loves and inspirations remind me. Does this revolt then, this rebellion, seep in bitterness and conflict right down, down, through my muscles and organs and neurons, into a hatred of the very attraction of sex, the hunger and preoccupation and the pleasure it offers to reward me for doing obediently as my body says? Made disgusting by a rejection of blind obedience on principle, a hatred of all the flaws and all of the victims enabled by the processes of just taking your pay, or endorphins, or promotion, and not thinking about whether what you're being paid to do is good. Could that conviction, revulsion, really be at the core of my longstanding recoil against, shame about, not exactly sex, but the love of and desire for sex?

Maybe.

I hadn't considered it before, but at first appraisal, it seems to make a lot of sense. The distaste and shame are still there, after all, after every kind of mental exercise and argument I could think of against kink shaming and slut shaming, after rejecting and rejecting again repeatedly as not having any right to determine my feelings every mote I could find of religious shame, of mere fear-of-judgement, of anything else. But there was some root that none of it has shifted. Is this that root?

My plans for the day had more to do with study and less to do with uncovering dysphoria hidden deep in my psyche, but hey, I'll take it. I will almost never refuse an opportunity to understand myself better.

The Brambleberry Walk

written two nights ago

The road from my new home into town is lined for several stretches on one side with thorny brambles and little growing bunches of blackberries. From the first day I was here, I tried picking and eating one or two experimentally. Today, I plucked small handfuls as I walked along, and found that many had grown soft and sweet and tasty. A couple of times, someone along the road has given me an odd look about it; someone laughed, someone asked weren't they good? And I felt I was being judged. I wonder if I am committing some faux-pas by "stealing" someone's berries. I don't know. I enjoy the forage, although not the judgement, which may be real or may be imaginary, as it so often is.

I ran some group games with my friends the other night, and got to enjoy their company, carefree and casual as it used to be, although the internet connection hosted on my phone does not support much, and several times the sound of the Jackbox game and all the voices just blended together into low screechy metal noise for several seconds until it jumped forward and began to update again. Still, it was fun. My housemate and host suggested a website I should visit to get a better deal on home broadband than I was able to find on my own, Just One Switch or something like that. I haven't called them yet though.

I am procrastinating on continuing my job search. I am anxious of failure and reluctant, highly tempted to just escape into socialising and play. I know the trap. I know the only thing for me is to set myself to the task and pursue it for as long as it takes. I still have my friends' support, of course. They are still willing to help me along with rewards, and my dear Samedi even mentioned that she would be willing to put a foot down and be firm with me if I needed that from someone. Perhaps I will enlist her. But then perhaps not yet. I am askitter and distracted, somewhere deep in my mind where I hardly even think it from moment to moment. I made my arrangements yesterday to meet Eoin again this Friday.

There is also the fact that I have been staying up late and often had a hard time staying awake before 2 PM or so. It is tempting to blame this on some species of jetlag, but it seems so characteristic of me when I'm in a position of stressful uncertainly that I feel that would be rather unfair. I make the walk through the bramble-sided path into town and back again, my mind mostly blank, the silence filled with podcasts or music. I begin to suspect that there is a roiling space somewhere were a hundred things lie waiting to be said, and perhaps I would feel better after I said them... only I am very reluctant to take the time to lie still and quest after that place, which may be difficult to find and painful to open. I think it will come open soon anyway.

Well then... I put to myself: Would it not be better for our meeting if I went there, opened the tense place and heard the messages there myself, so that I would know what they say and had some time to think over them before I face Eoin? I feel reluctant, and the reluctance feels similar to doubt, but I suspect it is only reluctance to do something difficult and uncomfortable. I sit typing in sticky clothes, worn for a couple of days. I could use a bath and a change. My bath, and the bathroom sinks here, have almost no water pressure. The custom in this house, apparently, is to run the hot water heater a little while and fill a bucket with water of a temperature which is comfortable, and run it over oneself with a measuring cup. It feels very quaint, very old-fashioned, in a way remniscient of my early childhood when I would sit in a bath and use a yoghurt container to pour water over my head in waves, or discover and delight in the trick of setting it so that it would form a sort of air seal and the water would stay in the upturned plastic tub, sitting on my head like a sea crown.

I did a load of laundry yesterday. Like many other things, that seems in some details delightfully old-fashioned. We have a dryer, but my house-mates usually hang their clothes to dry, avoiding the electrical drain. I followed suit, and hung remaining small garments in my bedroom, having run out of room I could reach on the line. I took them down today, surprised they were dry so soon, but content. I will see whether line drying makes them uncomfortable, and let that influence my attitude towards continuing to do my laundry this way.

I think a moment of my family. I hope they are well. I wonder what they would think of me, if they could see over my shoulder, a snapshot of the life I am living at just this moment. I wonder if they think of me at all much. Should they? I sigh. My mind feels heavy and confused, paralysed by the ready distractions in each direction from firm movement in each other direction. I'll set the water to warm. I may not be sure of anything else just now, but I can certainly use a bath.

The Red-Tailed Hawk

I was job hunting at the campus today, taking advantage of the quiet, disused classrooms of the late afternoon in summer term, and the air conditioning, with my laptop and my music.

I was walking around the campus after a couple of hours of work when the falcon flew by me. She passed only a foot or two from my left shoulder and crossed in front of me to land on the green, a huge bird larger than a raven, looking about the size of a cat... but lighter, no doubt; a lot of that visual size is feathers.

I came closer and watched her (male hawks are smaller, so it was almost certainly a her, because she was huge). She stood on the lawn, looking in every direction, checking her surroundings cautiously, and walking slowly. She seemed aware, but not alarmed, as I came closer and then eventually stopped when I could see her comfortably. A great bird; hooked beak; bright, cunning eyes; huge wings, a faded grey-brown with gentle variation; long, distinct fan of a tail, tawny coloured and ended with a thin black stripe and white tips. Having done some research at home, I understand she must have been a red-tailed hawk, possibly a Krider's or Harlan's hawk, with a light, spotted chest and face.

Her quarry was a small groundhog. It stared at her; she did not stare at it, but kept looking around her, alert for dangers. She often looked at me. The groundhog made its effort to back away. Trundling backwards, it was slow and awkward. Several times over the groundhog stopped, perhaps to rest, perhaps to encourage the hawk to forget it was there. She flared her wings at it while walking forward, making her visual presence huge and imposing, coming on like a living wall of talons and feathers, and several times she jumped at it with a single beat of her wings, patiently, testing.

The way it ended was that the groundhog backed into a wall; the corner bricks of a garden, not high, but twice the height of the animal. It could certainly have climbed the barrier, but it would have had to turn its back to do it. The hawk lunged, the groundhog hissed and counter-attacked, threatening to bite her talons. She drew back, but lunged again and struck, her broad wings hiding the groundhog from my view. I heard it scream quietly. She must have struck well, because she did not draw back and strike again, but only clutched it tightly until it was dead.

She raked it with her claws some time after it had stopped moving, and (always looking around her) adjusted her grip and flapped and stood on it; adjusted her grip again, and flew a short distance. The groundhog must understandably have been heavy, it looked a third of her own size. She stopped and rested in the garden, bit at the groundhog, and waited a while before flying another short distance onto another area of lawn.

At about that time, a visitor to the college campus greeted me and asked for directions finding something. While I was talking to him, the hawk flew away and I did not see where she went.

I occured to me that I could have run in and scared away the hawk, if I had wanted to; I could have rescued the groundhog, or taken the kill from her. I doubt she would have the audacity to fight something so much bigger than she was. It occured to me that I could probably eat a groundhog, although I have no idea how to skin and butcher wild beasts like this in order to eat them. Although I considered this, I only watched her, in quiet reverence and awe for the grace and the violence of the hunt.

I don't believe I've ever witnessed a wild animal hunting and killing another wild animal. There was something utterly beautiful to it, and perhaps part of that was the mercy of its brevity, and certainly part of it was the simple necessity of it to the hawk. Or perhaps it is largely that I was simply entranced by her. Watching her watch me, and the world around her, and hunt and claim the groundhog with what I can only describe as cool, competent professionalism, confidence and patience in every move, felt a little like falling in love.

I did a little bit of searching into falconry. I may want to consider seeking an opportunity to work with these birds somehow in the future.