July 6, 2015

 I forgot to mention the final game of the 2015 Women's World Cup was last night, the United States v. Japan. I only got to see the last twenty minutes after dinner, so I missed all the action, but the United States beat the pants off of Japan, five points to two points, and from my understanding one of those two points was counted as an own goal, so they really only scored one point. The United States scored four points in the first sixteen minutes and three of those were scored by the same player. The last one was scored from a foot or two beyond the midfield line. Embarrassing. Would have been a good game to watch. I was very much into the Women's World Cup back in 1999 when they won. I had a bunch of newspaper clippings pinned on my wall, up until we moved last summer actually. This time around I only managed to catch the last twenty minutes of the game last night. We'll pretend my not watching was the reason they did so well.

I also watched a mini-series, documentary of sorts last night. I was watching bits of the AP Music Awards and at one point they gave an award to Joan Jett, and it was presented by Laura Jane Grace. She is the lead singer of Against Me, and the last time I heard of that band the lead singer Tom Gabel came out as transgender. Turns out that was awhile ago and Tom has since become Laura. The documentary is a 10-part series online produced by AOL, hosted by Laura, that not only talks about her life but also the experiences of other trans people. It was really interesting and informative.

Much like gay people, I can only assume that trans people have always been around, but it hasn't been until fairly recently that they have become more noticeable in society. I would like to say more accepted as well, but we aren't quite there yet. Surely more accepted then last year or five years ago, or ten, so we're getting there. As gay people have become more accepted they have been able to educate the general public, which in turn helps with acceptance by decreasing ignorance. The same is now happening for the trans community. Slowly but surely. And I find it fascinating because I am one of the ignorant masses who doesn't know a lot, but I'm curious and working on educating myself.

Our whole lives we have been taught that there are boys and girls, and for the longest time, boys liked girls and girls like boys. Then we learn that sometimes boys like boys and girls like girls, which makes sense if only because that seems to happen all the time in other species, so why not humans. And now we're learning that sometimes even though someone has the body of one gender, they may not feel they are that gender. As a straight male who feels male (as much as I can assume the male gender is supposed to feel like), it is kind of hard to wrap my head around. Not the concept but the feeling. I am empathetic but it is hard to imagine feeling like another gender. I don't really have any context for it. But who does really? People feel the way they feel and then that is associated with a gender. And they have always felt that way so all of our assumptions about our feelings are really based on something that is apparently very subjective. So really we're all having to figure this out together. It's like science, where we make our best guess based on the evidence we're presented with, and then we change that guess as new evidence is presented. Just because there have always been boys and girls with matching internal gender identities, doesn't mean we have to stick with that viewpoint, especially after copious amounts of evidence has been presented to the contrary. I imagine at some point we'll get to the point of accepting that gender identity and sexuality exist on a spectrum, not specific categories. I don't see a true conversion to that way of thinking any time in the near future because beliefs are incredibly resilient to change, but hopefully it won't take too long for a general acceptance of the idea to be adopted.

Moving onto my day.

I woke up when my alarm clock went off but I had a headache so I took some Ibuprofen and went back to bed. Eventually I woke up again, took a shower, ate lunch, and went and got my haircut. I actually remembered my haircut. Thanks to three calendar reminders, a text last night from the lady who cuts my hair, and one or two mentions from my mom. I don't think I needed all of those reminders but I can't say they hurt.

When I got home I wrote my discussion post for my web design class. And as I wrote that last sentence I remembered that I was supposed to respond to two of my classmates' posts. Usually we have a due date for our posts on Monday and the responses are due my Wednesday. Apparently not so this week, unless it was a misprint, because there was only a single due date. So I stopped writing this and went to write those responses. It is after one o'clock in the morning, so technically past the due date, but fingers cross that isn't counted too harshly against me. I also made three responses instead of two, maybe to help my case a little.

I also read part of a textbook chapter. I need to get better at that because I am falling behind. It is taking me forever to get through the chapter I'm on. I only have a couple more pages left. And then a whole bunch more in all the other chapters I need to read. As mentioned before, my motivation has tanked recently. Below the usual levels. And it is kind of encompassing all things at the moment. It's not very conducive to productivity.

Tonight I watched Kill Me Three Times, a dark comedy about a bunch of bad people who eventually get what's coming to them. I enjoyed it. Then I watched the first episode of Stitchers, where a secret government agency goes into the memories of recently deceased individuals to solve mysteries. It kind of reminds me of the old TV show Seven Days. It's pretty interesting and the lead character kind of reminds me of a female version of Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory.

And now it is two o'clock so I'm going to go to bed. My eyes hurt. Tomorrow I want to read textbooks. Well, I don't really want to read them but I need to read them. So that's on my agenda.