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I’m blegging here for corrections. Nicole must have a letter in French asking for a long stay visa, explaining both why she wants one and that she will not work. I have a draft here, but I’m wondering if the spelling and grammar are ok and if it is formal and obsequious enough for french bureaucracy. Thank you.

Messieurs,

Je voudrais expliquer pourquoi je voudrais un visa de long séjour. Mon amie fera des études de musique au Centre de Création Musicale Iannis Xenakis à Alfortville entre octobre et mai prochains. Elle a un visa d’étudiant.

Je voudrais vivre avec elle. Elle paiera la moitié des frais de logement et la moitié de la nourriture. Je ne travaillerai pas à France. J’ai des fonds personnels pour mes frais.

Veuillez croire, Messieurs à mes sentiments cordiaux et respectueux.

Nicole Wilkins

Tag: Celesteh

The BBC has kind of an interesting quiz on sex and brains. But it’s not all brains. They have you measure the length of your index finger verses your ring finger. Many of you have probably heard that heterosexual women tend to have index fingers the same length as their ring fingers, or longer, whereas straight men and lesbians tend to have longer ring fingers. Women also have better hearing than men, but lesbians do not hear as well as straight women and are more like men. etc etc etc blah blah blah
The BBC says that finger length ratios are set in the womb. The presence of pre-natal hormones sets primary and secondary sex traits, such as finger lengths, certain brain structures, all the other secondary sex traits that are present at birth and also genitals. I read recently that 4% of the population is born intersexed. That’s a lot. Of course, this varies from slightly outside of “normal” to right in the middle. It seems like most IS people are not out. But it’s also the case that most are simply not informed. Their genitals are “corrected” shortly after birth and they go on to live their lives. (Doctors will operate on genitals with greater urgency than on actual health issues. A baby with a heart defect has to wait, but a baby with weird gonads goes under the knife. It’s a social emergency.) What’s more is that doctors, for many years, didn’t even bother to inform the parents. Nobody knows but the obstetrician.

It’s true that the number of girls born every year is climbing. This is often explained by women waiting to start having kids. Younger mothers are somewhat more likely to have boys. Older mothers are somewhat more likely to have girls.
The number of queers also seems to be rising. This is often explained by a greater ease of being out. This definitely plays a part. The number of trans people is also growing, often attributed in the same way. Nobody knows how many trans people there are, but in She’s Not There, Jennifer Finney Boylan asserts that the number of people who have had the surgery (she doesn’t specify, but I assume she means bottom surgery for mtfs) in the US is greater than the number of people diagnosed with MS. That’s a lot of people.
I’ve read that 80% of the fish in the San Francisco bay are female. This is blamed on pollution. I’ve heard people say that it’s run off from birth control pills. Women take the hormones and then later pee them out. They are in the sewage system and eventually end up in the bay where they change the hormonal balances of pre-hatched fish eggs. Fish that would have been born male are instead born female.
If runoff is getting into fish, it’s also getting into people. A lot of dangerous pesticides are something called “endocrine disrupters.” The mimic chemicals that naturally occur in the endocrine system in people. They aren’t so bad for adults, but they can really mess up a fetus. We have a kajillion scary chemicals all around us, as fire prevention treatment in our appliances, sprayed onto our food and just as environmental background. Many of these chemicals are similar to chemicals that naturally occur in our bodies.
Maybe the number of girls born every year has more to do with the number of female fish.
(Are there fish with gender confusion swimming around the bay?)
Autopsies of male to female transexuals show that their brains have structures more similar to female brains than to male brains. (I’m sorry, you’ll have to google the source for this, I’m too lazy.) The researcher claims that these differences were not caused by hormones taken later in life. They instead were the result of hormones in the womb before those folks were born.
On the one hand, the right wing wants to crush queers and oppress us. On the other hand, there are more of us every year. they also want to spew pollution everywhere. But this may be inflating our numbers beyond what they might have been otherwise. I don’t want to imply that being queer is any sort of birth defect, because I think it’s an improvement. I think we ought to figure out which chemicals cause queers but don’t cause any problems and use more of them and ban everything else.
(According to the BBC, I score just like an average woman, according to the summary. But if you look at the individual scores, I’m really, really good at “female” tasks and average male for “male” tasks. And my ring finger is unusually long for a man. Cola, however got more male than female. heh.)
Tags: Gender, Sexuality, Queer, Celesteh

When I was a youth, I went to a couple of queer youth group meetings. This was my first and (and only until today) experience with support groups. Only it was more like “go to these meetings until you find somebody to sleep with.” I went to two of them and then met a hot chick.

Anyway, today I went to a support group for very very queer folks. Queerer than me. I’m not really supposed to talk about it. I don’t think I’m really a support group sort of person. For one thing, I don’t like being supportive. No, it’s just weird. I mean, whatever. Not my scene. Not my group. Not my thing. I was totally out of place.
I’m really just a boring dykey dyke soft butch lesbian. But that’s so dull, I want to branch out to be queerer and queerer. And I mean, other queers are my brothers and sisters in queerness and I can go to the same parade as them and relate to some of their issues, but I’d like not to go to their meetings.
I’m going to the Lex later this week sometime. More details to follow.
Tag: Celesteh

I saw my final after it was graded and I think I might have actually earned a passing grade. Insane. I missed every question on devoir, however.

We went to Lane Splitter Pizza in the evening to celebrate the end of the class and the teacher came and announced that we all passed. So I drank a few pints to celebrate. And one of the waitresses saw me looking at a sculpture out in the beer garden and said, “Didn’t I see you playing at Luggage Store last night? You were good.”
Also, my binder came in the mail yesterday and fits great and is comfortable and effective, although not easy to get on and off. I can wear it and play didjeridoo at the same time. Prolly tuba too.
Mercury must be out of retrograde.
Tag: Celesteh

Last night, I went on BART, my favorite subway system, carrying on my person: A tuba, a backpack and a powered monitor speaker. In the backpack, there was a laptop, a mixing board, several power adaptors, a power splitter, a microphone and many cables. Each of these things alone could be characterized as “heavy.” I think I should invest in a wheeled contraption on which some of these things could rest, rather than carrying all of them.

So I set up my computer thingee and sound checked it and it sounded ok, if a little weird. It’s the patch I wrote for the Garden of Memory concert and I haven’t played it since. I only had one speaker (thank god), so I was playing mono. It would be fast enough to re-figure out. So we started playing and I was not getting any kind of consistent sound, mostly static. I looked at my mic input level and it was way down and then it was peaking, all over the place. So I was trying to troubleshoot while playing, which is always um.. special. I think either my mixingboard, mic cable or microphone is broken, or perhaps a bad cable. I dunno. I picked up my tuba and started playing that instead. Thank goodness for doubling.
It was alright. I like playing duets with wind instruments because it’s easier to keep track of and I’ve got a lot of vocabulary in common. I was playing with three other very talented musicians on double bass, saxophone and guitar. It was much more complicated and our vocabularies were all different. (Also, the guitar player was getting awesome electronic-y sounds and I was NOT! curses!) I dunno what people thought. I took off before the end so I could study for my French exam. For some reason, I had very little problem managing my belongings coming into the city, but on the way back, it was difficult to keep my backpack on my shoulders and too keep the speaker balanced on top of it.
And so I made sure to get enough sleep and this morning I awoke, ate breakfast, took vitamins and studied. For the first time in a while, everything seemed to be logical and fit in place. Woot. Then I biked to school and sat down to take the test.
And could not remember a damn thing.
I haven’t failed a class since 8th grade (I failed music and computers, for those of you who are curious). Failure, as they say, is not an option. If I fail a class, then I don’t get into a good college. If I fail a class, then I don’t get my degree. Hell, if I drop a class, I don’t graduate on time and end up paying a lot of extra money cuz school is expensive. So I don’t drop and I don’t fail.
I took a calculus class in junior college that I got a wholly undeserved B in. This is really my only hope for French class. I made sure to say in my godawful essay that I would speak great French once I’ve been in France for a little while and that why I took the class. If I got any of the tenses right (which I did not), it may even have been comprehensible. Have pity on me!
On the other hand, if I do fail the class, maybe I’ll go on to have some sort of exciting french-language career, like with the last classes I failed.
Playing a gig the night before the final wasn’t the smartest thing I’ve ever done, but I don’t think it actually made very much difference. I dunno. I got paid less than my bart faire. If I ever win the lottery, I think I’ll just play gigs until the money runs out.
I got called sir at least twice last night. My new blue stripey shirt is magic. When I put it on, I become male. Either that or anybody with so much stuff strapped to their person must be a man.
Tag: Celesteh

this is too good to wait to post
In 1910, “life” did not begin at egg fertilization for the catholic church. “Neither does [conception] concern the passive conception absolutely and simply (conceptio seminis carnis, inchoata), which, according to the order of nature, precedes the infusion of the rational soul. The person is truly conceived when the soul is created and infused into the body. ” And when does the soul get infused to the body? “at the first moment of [the fetus’] animation.” Um, right, so when did it become a universal truth that birth control drugs were killing a soul? So when do you start to feel the fetus moving around? Not during the first trimester, right?

there’s a word in politics for an institution changing it’s mind like this and then pretending it’s had that same belief forever. that word is “flip-flop.”
Tags: Catholic, Abortion, Immaculate Conception, Celesteh

Hillary Swank passes cuz she’s playing a young guy. Also, too bad I didn’t have Dr Dobson around in my youth to set me straight.
Ack. at least he focusses most on biological males. for two reasons: 1. tomboys are not as transgressive. 2. girls don’t matter anyway.
also, the way to make your boys straight is for mothers to defer to fathers all the damn time.
Apparently, if my (hypothetical future) kids call me “dad” it will make them queer. muahahahaha
Tag: Celesteh

Edit: 10 August 2005 20:29 PST: and the least convincing denial in the history of the blogosphere goes offline. I need a shrink.

I’ve been “groovy” on the web for around 10 years now (my how time flies). I thought I would be an early-re-adopter of the term, but it never really re-attained the popularity it once had. Plus, now it is so 1995. I mentioned the change to some folks at school and they heard the old name and fell over laughing. “What did you rename it to? ‘Gnarly Place’?”

Ok, maybe the new name is equally stupid. I’d have a name-that-blog contest, but I don’t care what you think.
My real website will shortly be re-christened as well, but the process is more complicated as it involves changing graphics, which means doing more than typing something in a little box at blogger. And I have this final exam thing to worry about.
There’s an official question and answer post coming up soon covering moving to france, xena’s fate and the uses of devoir. Submit your questions for inclusion!
Tag: Celesteh

If you have an BA/BS degree, you need an 80% to get a pass at UC Berkeley. I am going to fail my french class. It is too late to drop. I cannot switch to a letter grade neither.

This knowledge is not encouraging my studies. Quite the opposite. Maybe if I studied like a madman . . . but I’d rather take a nap.
this is fucking great for applying for phd there. maybe it means i’m not cut out for it.
Tag: Celesteh