every bullet point Maria can think of to write in her journal.
It’s scary and sad and a huge relief.
Suddenly she doesn’t feel all coffee exultant. She feels kind of tired and sees clearly that, like, hey stupid, you woke up at five AM , you are going to be exhausted all day. The graphic designers are gone. She doesn’t want to be at Kellogg’s any more. There’s still an hour and a half untill she has to be at work.
There’s a coffee shop near the bookstore. It’s not a Starbucks, although who even would care if it was. Caring about Starbucks monopolizing coffee culture is for people who don’t have more pressing problems.
Well. It is kind of depressing to try and kill an hour or two at a Starbucks. It’s hard, all trying not to hear people yelling into cellphones, getting depressed whenever anybody pays six dollars for a drink.
Maria packs up, pays the bill, and rides across the bridge into Manhattan.
Once the sun is risen, the early morning sky feels more like skin crawling than day breaking and she’s excited to lock up her bike and go to the little independent coffee shop near the bookstore. It’s not even a little coffee shop though, it’s huge and full of Internet terminals and magazine racks and, like, produce. Produce! Who knows how the thaumaturgy of commercial space rental in Manhattan works, but it seems unlikely that coffee and computer terminal rental and produce could possibly cover the rent on this cavernous coffee shop.
When you’re kind of feeling like you don’t know anything about anything, though, who cares. Whatever. How Zen. This is what enlightenment is like: it’s boring.
She decides to drink coffee and blog. Why not blow ten dollars on an hour of Internet access that you could be at home sponging from a neighbor for free right now. Figuring out your life is more important than rent money.
She buys a small coffee and gives the girl her driver’s license to get a computer. It’s weird but nobody has ever once given Maria shit for the gender on her license, not in the five years or whatever that she’s been presenting F but still an M in the eyes of the law. It’s expensive to get your documents changed, plus you have to go to city hall and be like, I am trans, please put that on a record somewhere, which gets harder and harder with every minute that people aren’t reading you as trans.
She’s assigned computer #27. The screen faces some tables, but eavesdropping on what somebody’s writing on the Internet is only interesting for a second, especially if there are large blocks of text that you would have to read. Nobody likes to read anything, even if it’s somebody writing like Oh, oh oh, when I look at myself naked in the mirror I see tits and a dick it makes me ever so sad. Which is funny. You’d think strangers would be interested in that kind of thing.
Maria, of course, would never use the word dick to write about her body. It’s way less traumatic to not use any words. Or a gender-neutral term like junk.
No big deal but Maria is kind of popular and famous on the Internet, but so is everybody, so it’s not very interesting. She’s been blogging since she was a tiny little baby, like eighteen or nineteen years old, when being online was just starting to be demystified into something Rupert Murdoch could make money from. She figured out that she was trans by blogging. Awkward.
The Internet at that time was this big, exciting place where you could anonymously spill your guts about gender and discomfort and heteronormativity and how weird male privilege felt and lots of other things, except back then she didn’t really have language for it so she just went like: everything sucks and I am totally sad. Just over and over and over and over, with minor variations and the occasional cuss word. It couldn’t have been very compelling to read, but writing about it at length made her pay attention to patterns and stuff and introduced her to the first real-life trans
It’s scary and sad and a huge relief.
Suddenly she doesn’t feel all coffee exultant. She feels kind of tired and sees clearly that, like, hey stupid, you woke up at five AM , you are going to be exhausted all day. The graphic designers are gone. She doesn’t want to be at Kellogg’s any more. There’s still an hour and a half untill she has to be at work.
There’s a coffee shop near the bookstore. It’s not a Starbucks, although who even would care if it was. Caring about Starbucks monopolizing coffee culture is for people who don’t have more pressing problems.
Well. It is kind of depressing to try and kill an hour or two at a Starbucks. It’s hard, all trying not to hear people yelling into cellphones, getting depressed whenever anybody pays six dollars for a drink.
Maria packs up, pays the bill, and rides across the bridge into Manhattan.
Once the sun is risen, the early morning sky feels more like skin crawling than day breaking and she’s excited to lock up her bike and go to the little independent coffee shop near the bookstore. It’s not even a little coffee shop though, it’s huge and full of Internet terminals and magazine racks and, like, produce. Produce! Who knows how the thaumaturgy of commercial space rental in Manhattan works, but it seems unlikely that coffee and computer terminal rental and produce could possibly cover the rent on this cavernous coffee shop.
When you’re kind of feeling like you don’t know anything about anything, though, who cares. Whatever. How Zen. This is what enlightenment is like: it’s boring.
She decides to drink coffee and blog. Why not blow ten dollars on an hour of Internet access that you could be at home sponging from a neighbor for free right now. Figuring out your life is more important than rent money.
She buys a small coffee and gives the girl her driver’s license to get a computer. It’s weird but nobody has ever once given Maria shit for the gender on her license, not in the five years or whatever that she’s been presenting F but still an M in the eyes of the law. It’s expensive to get your documents changed, plus you have to go to city hall and be like, I am trans, please put that on a record somewhere, which gets harder and harder with every minute that people aren’t reading you as trans.
She’s assigned computer #27. The screen faces some tables, but eavesdropping on what somebody’s writing on the Internet is only interesting for a second, especially if there are large blocks of text that you would have to read. Nobody likes to read anything, even if it’s somebody writing like Oh, oh oh, when I look at myself naked in the mirror I see tits and a dick it makes me ever so sad. Which is funny. You’d think strangers would be interested in that kind of thing.
Maria, of course, would never use the word dick to write about her body. It’s way less traumatic to not use any words. Or a gender-neutral term like junk.
No big deal but Maria is kind of popular and famous on the Internet, but so is everybody, so it’s not very interesting. She’s been blogging since she was a tiny little baby, like eighteen or nineteen years old, when being online was just starting to be demystified into something Rupert Murdoch could make money from. She figured out that she was trans by blogging. Awkward.
The Internet at that time was this big, exciting place where you could anonymously spill your guts about gender and discomfort and heteronormativity and how weird male privilege felt and lots of other things, except back then she didn’t really have language for it so she just went like: everything sucks and I am totally sad. Just over and over and over and over, with minor variations and the occasional cuss word. It couldn’t have been very compelling to read, but writing about it at length made her pay attention to patterns and stuff and introduced her to the first real-life trans
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