busybee

A couple weeks ago I traveled to Albuquerque to visit my family, and now I’m sick with some fun respiratory gunk. It may or may not be COVID (again). Hard to tell at this point. So far it’s at least not as bad as when I got it a year ago. But I’d still rather not be having it at all, y'know?

Anyway I think air travel is Bad, Actually.

Annoyingly this got in the way of all of my pride plans; I was meant to perform with the choir at Trans Pride Seattle last night, and today I was going to go to brunch with friends, and even if I didn’t feel like complete ass I also wouldn’t want to spread this crud to anyone else.

Come to think of it, I can’t recall any time in recent history that I traveled by airplane and didn’t end up getting sick shortly after. Like, even pre-COVID, it was pretty much a given that any time I traveled for work or whatever I’d end up with some awful crud.

I guess in more positive health news, there’s some promising research into new fibromyalgia meds, and also some pretty interesting advances in understanding what fibromyalgia even is and what treatments might help with the underlying issues. So that’s hopeful, at least. Solving fibro pain wouldn’t fix all of my problems but it’d at least make it easier for me to do the things I want to be doing.

“So, hey, I have a friend with what I think is a pretty… unique situation. You’re pretty savvy with this pronoun stuff, right?”

“Hm, I try to be, anyway.”

“Okay, so, this friend was born male—”

“Assigned male at birth.”

“… Right. Anyway. Assigned male at birth, totally identifies as male, one hundred percent happy being male. Wears men’s clothes, uses the extremely masculine name given to them, is completely secure in her masculinity, completely normal cis man.”

“Wait, so uh… okay, ‘normal’ is loaded, but… ‘Her?’”

“Yeah, that’s the thing. She prefers to be referred to with she/her pronouns.”

“… Huh. Is there any particular… reason for that?”

“Not as far as I can tell! I’ve asked her about it and she said that she just… likes it.”

“But… …she… doesn’t identify as a woman at all?”

“Nope. And I thought that maybe she is trying to, like, normalize the idea that language is a social construct or something, or push against the idea that ‘he’ is the gender-neutral pronoun, but nope. She just likes the sound of it.”

“And you’re sure she isn’t, like, trans or anything?”

“I mean, I asked her if she feels bad being called he/him, and no, she doesn’t seem to experience dysphoria around her gender or around being called he/him. She just.. prefers she/her.”

“Huh, okay. Well, I mean, anyone can choose to have whatever pronouns they want, and we should all respect that, no matter what the underlying reason is…”

“That’s just the thing, everyone around her does respect it. Even if they’re awful about misgendering actual trans women, for some reason they’re 100% on board with using she/her pronouns for this… well, totally nor— … um, extremely cis man.”

“Aside from the pronouns.”

“Yes, aside from the pronouns.”

“Huh. Well, um… this is an interesting situation, I think, but it probably shouldn’t be interesting. It’s kind of refreshing to hear about? I mean, sort of. I wish people would respect my pronouns that easily, but…”

“Yeah, it’s like the dog thing.”

“Dog thing?”

“Y'know, how people trip over themselves to make sure that they’re using the correct pronouns for a dog? That doesn’t even know what pronouns are and doesn’t give the tiniest shit about them? While still misgendering trans people because it’s ‘so hard?’”

“Ah, yeah, that. Well. Okay. So what’s the problem your friend is having?”

“Oh, she isn’t having a problem at all. I’m just wondering, do you know what this situation would be called?”

“Sounds like she’s a… she-male?”

“…”

“Yeah, I only realized what I was saying as it was leaving my mouth.”

Ben Werdmuller posed a question:

If your company gives its employees a space to blog or journal internally, what platform do you use? What do you think of it?

eg: Confluence has blogs; at Medium they have a whole internal version of the site called Hatch; etc.

Back in the day, Amazon had an internal Movable Type site for internal blogging purposes, although it went mostly unused. When I returned for a couple years in 2012 it was still there although even more completely unused. I posted a couple more entries on it that nobody saw as far as I know.

Nowhere else I’ve worked has had formalized internal blogging (although a couple places had public blogging platforms that were mostly used by marketing folks), although a lot of people certainly would treat Slack as their personal blog.

Back in June of 2022 I was let go from a job in a way where I was eligible for unemployment benefits. I immediately filed an unemployment claim, but the response that it was “pending adjudication” due to a wrinkle in how I was let go. I was told that I needed to continue to submit claims weekly if I was to receive any benefits.

However, I was unable to submit those claims. The website would not allow me to submit a claim because it was “pending adjudication,” and all contacts to the ESD resulted in a message that I should call a phone number. I called that number, and I’d be put on hold for two hours, told that nobody was available to help me, and that I should use the website for my unemployment claims needs.

One week ago the adjudication finally found in my favor, but at this point my benefit period has almost ended and I will still be unable to receive my unemployment benefits. And I am told that I should have been submitting my claims every week during this whole period — which I was unable to do, for the reasons stated.

How is any of this fair? This is a frustrating bureaucratic nightmare that needs to be completely overhauled. Sometimes it feels like the cruelty is the point, and that this system is not in place to benefit the people who need it.

Thank you for your consideration.

(Also sent to my state representatives Emily Alvarado and Joe Fitzgibbon, and senator Joe Nguyen.)