Innocence superlative?

I am very distressed at my work load.

I managed to get my databases coursework mostly finished to my satisfaction, but I only achieved this by calling upon my emergency reserves. And I have already suffered for that.

Exhausted is where I was two days ago. A good word for how I feel now might be 'depleted'.

If I want to finish my operating systems coursework by the deadline, I'm looking at devoting half of my waking hours to it. This morning I had a small breakdown at the prospect.

What's bizarre is that the prospect of losing marks doesn't phase me. I could hand in nothing and I'd lose about a fifth of an eighth of a fifth of my degree.

Rather, I'm getting upset about this because I've been trying so hard to be a Good Student, and the prospect of giving up feels like a betrayal of the highest order. All of my efforts to be a real person who can do things would have been proven false.

In my heart I have already failed. I don't have any breakfast, so I have to go shopping before I can eat, but I can't muster the energy for this. My weekend will mostly consist of sleeping and being barely awake.


So, here's my plan of attack.

Originally I was going to go to campus to work, but at this point, spending so much energy on travel is a stupid idea. I can remotely access the campus computers and just accept the uncooperative interface.

I'm also giving up on handing it in on time. The penalty for late submissions is 5% a day, and it's really not worth the pain to save myself the 5%.

So over the next few days I'm going to spend as many hours on it as I can deal with, and at the end submit something that is far from finished but at least counts for something, in the hope that I can preserve my sense of self worth.


I really can't believe I've gotten myself in the situation where I'm too hungry to get food. I was doing so well.

This is my coursework week.

I have some database coursework due in on Friday. I spent Tuesday essentially blitzing through all of the material I was supposed to have learned by this point. My grasp of it is shaky but at least now I know where to look for all the bits I need.

I spent an hour starting it after my lectures today, and it looks to me like question 1 and 2 are by far the largest time consumers. I'm hoping to have question 1 finished by midnight today. And I'm hoping to have finished 2, 3 and 4 by midnight tomorrow. If not, I'm getting up at 6am on Friday, getting the first bus to campus and burning my way through the rest until the deadline at noon.


I also have some operating system coursework due in on Monday. I haven't looked at it yet. I'll look at it on Friday evening and judge how much time it needs. Hopefully I'll be able to dedicate myself sufficiently over the weekend. Even though Joe is having a birthday downstairs on Saturday. If necessary, I'll get up stupidly early on Monday to finish it.


What's especially silly is that both of these courseworks were set 4-5 weeks ago. I could have burned my way through them when they were set and be having a perfectly relaxing week now. Or I could have worked on them with a moderate pace throughout the period I was given and not once have stressed over them. But no, I left it until this week. It's actually an improvement that I didn't leave it for the night before.

Will I have learned to pace myself by next term? Probably not.

I have a small exam on algorithms on Monday as well. I doubt I'll have any time to prepare for it. I'll just have to hope that it's as easy as the last one and wing it.

AND I have a small piece of assessed work for algorithms due in Tuesday morning. It's sufficiently low priority that I'm leaving it until Monday evening, after my operating systems coursework and my small exam :P


What's very unfair is, after that, I have a very peaceful schedule. I'm not expecting any more work for these modules, and some of them are saying they won't even hold lectures the last time they're supposed to. If the coursework deadlines could just have been set a few days later... I'd probably have left it a few days later and be in the same position now.


Next week is the last week of term. After that I have four weeks off. I'd like to spend the whole time lying on my bed in a zombie-like stupor, but unfortunately I have proper exams for essentially every module in the first week back. Proper as in worth 2-3 times as much as this coursework I'm rushing to finish.

My intention is to put in about two hours every day preparing for them. I can go over the lecture notes and write new, briefer notes, work through all the problem sheets again, and try past exams. With all of this cheating I fully expect to get 90%+ in all my exams. Assuming I can keep to such an ambitious schedule =P

It's also my intention to stop filling every last second of down time with video games. I've got a list of game concepts I want to code, and it'd be nice if I could start devoting part of every day to developing them. I've been having some ambitious ideas the last few weeks; rather than just getting the basic engine in place to prove I can and then moving on, I could start making proper applications, with Graphics and Sound Effects and Menus! And I'm really intrigued by the idea of writing down your design plan before coding it :P There have been so many times I've decided half way through I want to do something different or want to add some feature, only to realise I'd have to scrap pretty much everything I've done thus far...


But! During all this terrifying work, the holiday will happen. I'm going to spend 4-6 days in Cambridge, one of which will be Christmas. I want to spend some time with my family, and also squeeze in as many friends as I'm able. That's something I can organise next week.

AND I'm hoping to visit Swansea. Possibly for as many as six days. Because it's really my turn by this point. And because I'll have no day to day obligations, I'll have a much more flexible sleeping schedule. >D


I just... I don't know if I can cope with being this busy. We'll have to see.

I started my diet seven weeks and four days ago.

My diet has cut out all chocolate, crisps, biscuits, cake, ice cream, pastry, sweets and alcohol. And also fizzy drinks! Except when I'm eating out. Because I say so :P

I'm sticking to two meals a day. Either toast or cereal for breakfast, and for dinner a meal that's Exciting and Cooked with Vegetables! I've become quite the little chef.

I drink mostly water, indulging in fruit juice occasionally, and should I ever get the urge to snack I have a piece of fruit.

I am aware that whatever reading I get from the scales is dependant on what I'm wearing at the time, what I've eaten recently, how full my bladder is, how randomly errored my scales feel like being today...

For psychological reasons, I like to take my maximum weight as the weight I started on, and my minimum weight on any given day to calculate my total weight loss. I figure that only so much of that can be accounted for by the above technicalities (maybe two, three pounds?) and the rest must be actual consumption of body fat.

During the first three weeks, my weight plummeted by 9lbs. I figure some of that is the difference a full stomach makes.

The next two weeks saw a much more conservative 3lbs loss. However, I spent a good portion of that being quite disheartened, because my weight had fixed itself to 12st 7lbs and refused to budge.

I then had a few big meals in a row, and was terrified of seeing my weight go up, so I didn't weigh myself. And I kept not weighing myself for over two weeks.

Then I weighed myself this morning and, surprise! I've lost another 3lbs. I feel encouraged, that my stringent self restraint is worth something. I'm now sitting neatly on 12st 4lbs.

The question was raised recently, how much weight do I want to lose? Apparantly where I am now is a good weight and to lose any more would risk looking scrawny and unhealthy.

I'm certainly happy with where I am at the moment. The above coupled with a daily exercise regime (also going strong for 7+ weeks) coupled with continued drugs has made me positively slender, firm and curvacious in all the right places.

But I'm genuinely afraid of stopping. I guess to stop losing weight I'd have to bring my average calorie intake in line with my metabolism. Which I could do by having bigger meals, or having lunch. But what I really want to do is start eating junk food again. And what I'm afraid of is, should I ever indulge in that one harmless bar of cadbury's, I'll be back on the daily tubes of pringles and tubs of ice cream within a week. Because that's what happened -every- -single- -time- I've tried to lose weight. I understand nothing of moderation.

(It was heart breaking when people bought me chocolate for my birthday and I gave it away.)

Interestingly, this BMI calculator tells me I only just entered the heaviest range of 'healthy weight'. Should I want an ideal weight, I need to lose another 20lbs, apparantly.

But my impression of BMI is that it's a shifted scale. Essentially everyone I know counts as 'overweight'. You have to be unusually thin to count as a 'healthy weight', and I've never met anyone so anorexic as to actually count as 'underweight'. And I've known some people with anorexia.

So I guess my decision is, keep losing weight, put off decision for later. Maybe I'll wait until I look too thin by my own estimation, and then I have a little margin of error for getting my weight stable.

So far I have been to the gender clinic in London six times. I've seen doctor #2 once and doctor #1 five times.

The vast majority of each session is taken up by asking me questions about my life, while the practical medical stuff is shunted to the end if there's any time to spare.

What occurred to me just now, though, is that each and every time I've been to see them, I have been asked "Where do you think your trans urges come from?" Every time I answer that I don't know, I've had them since I was very young, there could in principle be any number of reasons but I can't distinguish between them and it would hardly matter if I could.

What bothers me is that I've been asked this by the same doctor five times, and every time I answer him, he writes it down! Is he hunting for inconsistencies?

Part of me feels they're looking for an answer like "I was raised by lesbians who put me in dresses when I was a boy and all I want is their approval", so they can say "Oh, that's easy, a few months with a psychologist and we can talk you right out of that."

It doesn't seem to matter how immeasurably happier I've been since transition, their questions seem designed to catch me out. After explaining my thoughts on the subject in detail the first three times, I'm still getting asked how I identify, as if that might have changed in the last three months and I'd forget to tell them.

I shouldn't complain though. They seem to like me a lot, and have given me a lot of drugs a lot earlier than many transwomen without much fuss. I've also been told that, while it's procedure for a transsexual to wait two years between 'going full time' and having surgery, it's not strictly the rules and I could have mine as much as six months early.


Also, while I'm on the subject, I've had another thought. Back when I was first getting my hormones, the gender doctor said he'd send a letter to my GP asking him to prescribe me. I was told I should wait a week for it to arrive, and then as soon as I could present a deed poll I'd get my drugs.

A week later I went to my GP with my deed poll in hand, but was told the letter hadn't arrived yet. When I phoned the clinic, they said the letter had definately been sent and I should wait another three weeks before starting to worry.

Three weeks later, the letter still hadn't arrived. I phoned the clinic and they said they'd resend it. Two weeks after that and it -still- hadn't arrived, I phoned and they said it had been sent yesterday.

It didn't arrive until eight weeks after the initial appointment, and then I had some extra stresses waiting for my GP to process the prescription and then waiting for the pharmacy to have my drugs delivered.

What I'm wondering though, is why the fuck can't these doctors email eachother and have the message arrive before I've left the room? Don't they know how hard those two months were on me, how much harder they might have been for someone else? Then if there's some miscommunication, it can be sorted out within in the day, because it takes a second for a message to reach it's destination, and doctors can have actual conversations rather than retarded pen-pal style relationships.

And since when should I wait four weeks before worrying that the letter might have been lost? I've had limited experiences with the post, it's true, but I've come to expect they can get a letter across the country in a few days. I wonder if it's actually code for "We haven't done anything yet, but now that you've complained we'll consider dealing with you in the next few weeks."


Again, while I complain, they've been very nice to me. Their policy is to have two face to face meetings before they'll prescribe hormones. Two of my friends are waiting 8-9 months before their second appointment, while I only waited two months. It frequently feels like the doctors are going out of their way to speed me through an obstructive system with as little fuss as possible. Which just makes me wonder why they can't do that for everyone....

This video is amazing in several different ways. It made me cry. I feel everyone should see it.

Drawings in the Sand

Once upon a time I had a lecturer. This lecturer was very dry and monotonous, always filling his lectures with incomprehensible buzzwords, focusing exclusively on the theory and never once giving a practical application. He sounded suspiciously like a Dilbert comic, full of "Let's proactively reorganise our synergy!" Attempting to interpret his sentences in the context of reality quickly reduced me to little more than a zombie, unable to articulate thoughts or keep my eyes open.

For most of the course, I had assumed that this was simply a consequence of the subject matter. While everybody else got to talk about efficient algorithms, fail-safe asynchronous networks and databases free of redundancy (all very exciting, technical stuff!), this poor lecturer was shafted with time and cost estimates, development models, talking to the customer theory and all the boring parts of programming that I want to stay away from.

So you can imagine my surprise when, one day, a new lecturer came to speak, a guest lecturer, and it turned out to be exceptionally useful! He kept his language very simple and clear, and peppered his talk with real world examples of how his various points turned out to be relevant and/or useful. It really showed that this new lecturer was a genuine software developer, and the other was just a stuffy academic in comparison. I came away feeling genuinely enlightened about human computer interfaces.

It was, however, a mixed blessing. I knew that next time I'd return to my stuffy academic, and to have a taste of How It Might Have Been left me mournful.

I came to the conclusion that, while this module was inevitably going to be my lowest mark of the term, I could at least have some hope for software development itself.

During my visit to Cambridge I brought a reasonable amount of entertainment with me, including a book by Iain M. Banks called Inversions. I liked it a lot, and it was immersive enough to make me read it all the way through even when I had other things to do.

The characters were deep, the setting was interesting and the style was beautiful. As seems to be a common theme in Banks books, the bit that bothered me most was the ending. Allow me to explain.

There were two plot threads, consisting of different places and entirely different sets of people. Throughout the book I was expecting them to intertwine somehow but it turned out they touched on eachother so subtley they might have been two different books.

The bulk of the book, and the part of the book I enjoyed most, was watching these two strange, out-of-place foreigners interact with their backwards society from the perspective of two locals (one for each plot thread). Many of the scenarios were unrelated to eachother and to the lesser plot, and only served to give us some insight into the characters. I say 'lesser plot' because while there certainly was a plot, it seemed like such an afterthought. I found I enjoyed many of the later scenes most by trying to ignore that Plot Is Happening.

In particular, one of the plot threads had many secondary characters, all of whom were dukes and all of whom were ultimately interchangable. Maybe three times in a row Plot reared its ugly head by going "Oh no! Duke such and such is dead!" but I found myself struggling to distinguish one Duke from another. It didn't help when one of the dukes was immediately replaced by his son of the same name.

The ending bothered me because it attempted to wrangle some sort of resolution out of the lesser plot, and it was so strained and awkward it almost made me wish I hadn't read it. I also want to mention that, although I had spent the entire book expecting the two principle characters to meet in some interesting circumstance, this never happened. I felt somehow robbed.

With that said, the vast majority of the book was a joy to read, and I do recommend it. =)

A small clerical error interrupted my drug plans. They don't keep my injection in stock, they order it specially for me; I'm the only one in the whole village that uses it ;)

The last two times, both my appointment and my drug ordering were handled by the nurse I was with at the time. However, this time I didn't want to book the next appointment immediately, because I was awaiting some blood test results, to see if I'd need to book for ten weeks or twelve.

As a consequence, when I phoned up, neither I nor the receptionist I spoke to knew that the drug had to be ordered, and now they don't have any.

Fortunately, the NHS is surprisingly efficient in this regard and I'm expecting to get the newly-ordered injection later today. The nurses involved were very apologetic and nice about it. And now I know for next time =)


Also, surprise passing at the chemist! I usually assume everyone who looks at me can tell I'm trans, or even assumes I'm simply male depending on what I'm wearing. But when I was picking up my pills the cashier looked at me with shock and said "Why are you taking finasteride?! You know it's only for men, right?" They didn't stop to wonder what a nineteen year old is doing taking a drug usually reserved for menopausal women... =P

My, I'm being prolific. I'd like to record a small essay I wrote on the topic of gender.

The question was, brutally paraphrased:

Feminism says gender and sex are different, and that gender is nothing but a social construct. BUT those poor transsexuals have that terrible gender dysphoria which implies gender is innate.
SO do we declare that gender really is innate, in which case anyone who thinks they're some sort of freaky genderqueer is simply wrong, OR do we declare that it isn't, and all those transsexuals are just filthy liars?¹

And my response:

"Confusion arises when 'gender' means both 'socially constructed gender roles' and 'innate gender identity'. I'm going to express all the messiness using completely new terminology. See if you can follow my meaning!


People are born with two aspects; biologies and psychologies. Biologies often feat into neat categories, but often don't, in a variety of interesting ways. Psychologies can be happy with their biologies, or unhappy. Both aspects are innate (ie. not thrust upon us by society), and are subject to change. Sometimes frequent change.

Then there are the social expectations. Your category is declared, and then a slew of behaviours are expected of you. In truth, behaviours are dependant on psychologies, not categories, and this is feminism's point.

Your biology may be declared a certain category, and behaviours expected of you. Then you might say, no, I am not happy with this biology. Then you might be declared another category, and another set of behaviours expected. This is not improvement.
Instead you might say, I am not happy with these expectations. You behave rather in the manner your psychology sees fit, but the expectations do not go away.

The problem is that every behaviour has been split. Everything you might ever say, do, wear, think, go to or be attracted to to has been squished into a category. This split is totally arbitrary (feminism). Your psychology may instead express behaviours from many categories (gender queerism).


So in this simple model, there are two degrees of freedom, your biology, and your psychology. You, the psychology, may want any biology, (in any, many or none of the categories), and you may express any behaviours (again, from any, many or none of the categories).
From this we see it is the categories that are false. One of your behaviours may fit into a certain category, but this implies nothing about your other behaviours.


Phew, did you follow that? I'm going to bring it back down into real words now.

This is an unusual stance for me to take. As a transwomen, I often declare vigorously that 'female' is something intrinsic that I experience and would still be there regardless of society. This is how it fits.

I was unhappy with my body. In a society free of gender roles, I would still want it changed. I'm not entirely sure why.
I was also unhappy with the expectations upon me. I defined as 'female' because I felt that category of behaviours fit me significantly better, and these were the behaviours I would rather have expected of me. Of course, not everything I do is stereotypically feminine, and this is where the category fails. I defined this way because it was easier and less wrong.

Ideally, we would be free of both expectations and categories. If I was free to wear and do what I wanted (within the bounds of some morality...), I'm sure I would have had a much happier childhood. I'd just still want my biology changed."

¹ I realise this phrasing makes the original poster look like an awful bigot. It was actually phrased very eloquently and diplomatically and I'm just having my own weird kind of fun by saying it this way.