Christmas Eve

Christmas was stolen from the pagans:  the winter solstice; the changing of seasons; the darkest day of the year.

Today has been a long day for me.



Lady M and I were supposed to leave two days ago.  We were going to make the long trek from the Frigid Northlands to the Blasted Southlands.  We were going to have a Decompression Day.  We were going to wrap presents, celebrate festivities, and get to bed early.

Most of that has happened.  She's seated on the couch next to me right now, in the ancillary living room at the end of the hall, hand-sewing the finishing touches on a blanket for her mom.  I'm happy.  More than that, I'm content.

But there's more than that.  It's just now ten o'clock, and I need to knock out my Tuesday blog post.  There is happiness; there is contentment; there is... "purpose," I guess.  There is... weight.

Today has been a long day.

It has been something of a tradition in my family to swap holidays during the year:  through divorces, remarriages, and partnerships of our own, the pattern is to alternate back-and-forth between one location and another, one group and another.  I used to spend Thanksgiving with my mother one year, and Christmas with my father, then reverse them the following year.  My brother A now spends Thanksgiving with us one year, and Christmas with his wife's family, and then they reverse them the following year.  In like fashion, So On extrapolates into So Forth, and things... unravel.  Fall apart.  No center can hold.  There is an irreducible element of chaos, as schedules change at the whim of externalities.  Lady M and I decided to take a different tack:  we spend both Thanksgiving and Christmas with my family one year, and both with hers the next.  That way, we have travel-heavy years and travel-light years, but we don't completely miss anyone on either side.  At least, not for more than one year.

This is her year.  Last year was mine.  Thanksgiving has always been a bit touch-and-go for me.  As the screw-up of the family, I was never trusted with much:  cranberry sauce, usually, and often as not I'd forget it.  Sometimes I would be able to run out at the last minute and pick it up.  Other years, I wouldn't be able to make it at all, and I'd spend the day alone in my apartment because I lacked either the time or the money to travel.  When money was the only obstacle, my parents would offer to buy me a train ticket, but it turns out that pride is a Hell of a thing.  So on my lonesome years, instead of a Thanksgiving Feast, I had a Thanksgiving Fast.  This, at least, was by choice:  I'd have a pound of bacon in the fridge on those years, and after eating nothing since the past stroke of midnight, when the next came around I would fry up and eat an entire pound of bacon all by myself.

The weird thing is... I kinda liked it.

No, I liked it a lot.  I couldn't have family togetherness and gluttonous abundance, so I would choose deprivation and then follow it up with... I mean, it's an entire pound of bacon.  How can you go wrong?  I'll tell you how:  talk to your coworkers about it.  One guy, one year, was downright affronted that I would have a Thanksgiving Fast.  I said it was everyone's holiday, so why did he care how I chose to celebrate it?  It's not like I was telling him how to celebrate, after all.  He said, and I'll remember this for the rest of my life, "It's just... un-American."  I shot back that I chose to use my fast to reflect on my blessings as an American, to really think about how good I had it at the end of the day, that I was able to choose to fast on a holiday celebrating abundance.  He was mollified by this, and then I added that at the stroke of midnight I eat an entire pound of bacon, and he seemed satisfied.

What a weirdo he was, amirite?

I'm getting distracted.  It's probably the alcohol.  The point of all this is, Lady M is an amazing cook, and it turns out that I'm the best sous chef she's ever had; so wherever we land for Thanksgiving now, we're cooking.  It's great, don't get me wrong; it's just different from what most of the last fifteen years of my life have been.  I had a moment just this past Thanksgiving, when we got everything on the table right on time, and I looked at the clock and realized that we'd been working since nine in the morning, and I just thought to myself, "This is my life now."  And it was a happy thought!  It just so happens that it was also utterly inconceivable to me just a few short years ago when I was struggling to expand my repertoire from cranberry sauce to desserts.

But this is her year.  That means the time crunch is all for her family, and we'll get around to mine by way of weekend visits throughout January and probably February.  The Fucking Short Version is that pretty fuckin' much every possible fuckin' thing went wrong and threatened to derail the whole fuckin' project at every fuckin' step of the way.  That's... a bit of an oversimplification.  But not by a lot.  We meant to leave at 5 a.m. on the 22nd, and a delay of two to four hours was expected... but we didn't end up leaving until 11:30 p.m. on the 23rd.  To drive a thousand miles.  In one shot.

Good thing I love driving!  I love watching the scenery go by, I love watching the sky change, I love the pure sense of moving through space.  I love to just keep moving.  Road trips are just the best!  And especially so when I have a travel companion:  Lady M and I alternate between podcasts, music, talking to each other, BreadTube videos, navigation discussions, and her sleeping while I get to spend a little bit of extended time alone with my thoughts.  I used to do most of my blogging while I should have been working, and these days I do the bulk of the work in my head while I'm driving around.  Plus, even though it's a fucking thousand miles, we've made this trek a handful of times before, and it gets easier every time.

We usually don't start it in the middle of the night, though.  After one of her catnaps, she wakes and asks how I'm doing.  I tell her I'm fine, and she asks where my focus level is at.  I remind her that driving is both relaxing and stimulating for me, and that constant tension keeps me in a flow state - "in the zone," so to speak.

"It just doesn't seem like it would be very stimulating," she says.  I remind her of the scenery going by, the sky changing, the sense of moving through space.  She says, "But... it's pitch black out.  How do you get any of that, if you can't see anything?"

I sort-of "shudder," like a fly just landed on my nose, as I remember that I have much better darkvision than her.  Yes, there's a range of natural human variation, but then I've been specifically trained to see movement through blackness, to see the deeper dark between the shadows, to tease apart and interpret the slightest differences in what... some?  many?  most? - in what a lot of people would just see as inchoate night.  Some people are naturally very perceptive, sensitive to subtle changes in the environment, but ninja training hones that to a razor edge.  Even dulled by ten-plus years without practice, it never really "goes away," kind of like riding a bike.  And... to be frank, it's not like I don't have opportunities to keep my skills sharp.

Every time I use a public restroom and someone approaches, I'm instantly tuned into the sound of his footfalls:  what does the timing say about his stride length, and thus his height?  What does the volume say about his weight?  What does the roll of his sole on the floor say about his agility?  What kind of shoe is he probably wearing?  I can't tell any of this for sure, but I can triangulate from many pieces of data to make a decent guess.  Then when he enters and gets line-of-sight on me... does he break stride at all?  Does he stop?  Which toilet does he go for?  I can make a decent guess at all of these things, without ever looking at him, and I'm constantly aware of how far he is from me.  All while pissing in a rest stop urinal.  Add to this the fact that I'm 6'2", obviously pierced and tattooed, and have a rather solid frame... I will never look like easy pickings.

I've never been "afraid," per se, in a Men's room.  But I'm always on edge.  I can't imagine what it's like for a trans woman without my particular... "perks."

I don't want to sound like I got to college, took three years of ninja training, and then suddenly thought I was hot shit.  If anything, it's worse:  to the extent I was ever "hot shit," it happened long before I crossed paths with those two guys in black gi on the quad.  I grew up fighting.  I had to deal with 80s and 90s bullies - not the kind who cyberstalk you and dogpile you on social media; the kind who attacked in trios where one would pin your arms, the other would hold your ankles, and the third would straddle your torso and just beat on you until he (and in my experience, it was always a "he") felt like stopping.  Since I grew up moving around, and since I've been 6'2" since I was fourteen, I was always the new kid, and always the big kid.  The lessons I took from watching She-Ra, Batman, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles boiled down to:  always stand up to bullies, you might get whupped at first, but you'll always win in the end.  After getting beat up a few times too many in first grade, my dad took me to his karate classes.  Then in second grade, I stopped losing fights.  Cue cliche:  "i NeVeR sTaRtEd FiGhTs, BuT i SuRe EnDeD tHeM."  It happened to be true, in my case - but it's still cliche as fuck.

But... like... picture that in the worst way you can, for the kids who tried to take me down.  And then I just vanished next year.  Some kids who came at me, wound up in hospital.  I didn't try to put them there, I was just trying to defend myself, and make sure they never started shit again.  But through all the noise, I noticed something:  when I lost fights, I was ridiculed.  But when I won fights, especially fights against superior numbers?  I wasn't vindicated, respected, or admired in any way at all.  I was feared.  The bullies still came at me:  for looking like a "f*g," for talking to girls too much, for being the new kid all over again.  It didn't matter what I did.  I was a "failed boy," a gender fuck-up, a perpetual outsider, and there was no inroad for me.

That eventually changed.  My father got custody.  My brother A, it turns out, was one of the cool kids in school, and we happily married into his family, which bought some small measure of forebearance.  I still fucked up a lot, don't get me wrong:  I was the kid from the lower-class suburbs, the kid who didn't know that a "play push" just for show wasn't a "real push" that starts a fight, the kid who... Jesus... the kid who got knocked down on the playground one day, and then scissor-kicked the boy who did it... and then clawed his face off.

I was not in a good way.  But some way, somehow, brother A saw that I was the kind of person who didn't understand the world, but knew who I was.  He saw that I didn't take shit from anybody, even if I knew sure as dammit that meant taking more shit in the long run.  As one of the... I mean, he's a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, conventionally handsome, charismatic, physically fit, cool kid.  With all the tightrope-walking that entails.  We both embodied, down to the white-hot cores of our beings, what the other could never have:  the cool kid on top who has it all, and the nothing-to-lose outcast who can never be broken.

Holy shit, how the fuck did our parents ever marry?

Yeesh.  It's after midnight.  I'm gonna have to backdate this one.

The ever-loving point of that segue is that I kinda-sorta went on a "quest to become the ultimate fighter," and... I succeeded in the worst possible way.  Somewhere along the line, I became the kind of monster I was trying to fight.  Which was a real problem for me, because I'm a paladin at heart.  I mean, I have a pretty rewarding career, and I'm happier now with my life than I ever thought I could reasonably be... but... what really gets my motor going?

Smiting evil with righteous fury.

It took me for-damn-ever, well into my teens, to learn that the evils what need smiting are usually the very folks directing the societally-approved smiting.  For a person like me, we've always lived in a dystopian nightmare, a morally upside-down world where the very worst people run the place, and if they'd all just disappear in a puff of smoke, then the world would be an objectively, measurably, better place.

...but if I make them disappear in a puff of smoke, suddenly everyone's screaming, "WAHHH!  SHE'S A MAD SCIENTIST!  WAHHH!  SHE'S GOT A DEATH RAY!  WAHHH!  RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!"

The technical philosophical term for this is "strong internalist moral intuitions":  I have a very strong moral center, which is in fact so strong that it's really difficult for me to conceive of someone who doesn't also have a strong moral center.  So when I encounter such a person, I emotionally reject them.  And I have spent years-upon-years trying to unlearn this.

But tying it back to concretes for a minute, the reason my father divorced my mother is because (in an oversimplified nutshell) her particular issues made the marriage impossible; and the reason he got custody from her in the early 90s is because (in an oversimplified nutshell) she was abusing my brother JD and me pretty severely and was declared an unfit parent; so on top of all this schoolyard bullying, and new school every year, and general transgender whatever the fuck, I was also getting the shit kicked out of me by my own mother on a daily basis for basically no reason at all.  Oh!  And while she was brought up on criminal battery charges, she was acquitted because the court determined she was too preoccupied with her own problems to be properly aware of the harm she was doing to JD and me.  So... how's that for a mindfuck when you're eight?!

Then my dad got custody.  Then the fights... kinda lost their point.  Then... I kinda stopped fighting.  I mean, I still got in fights, but I can count them on one hand between sixth and eighth grade, and there were none after that.  For the rest of my life until now.  But one of those "count on one hand fights?"  It was a fight against my mother, yet again.  It was the first fight against her that I ever won.  And it was the last fight the two of us ever had.

So.

This is the "readiness to fight" that I kinda have to bring to the Men's room every time I walk in.  I wear it like a blanket.  It keeps me warm and feeling safe.  And I am so fucking glad it never comes to blows, because the cops would probably not believe me when I tried to tell my side of the story.  Y'know, living in the constant Trumpster-fire like we Americans do.  But I also know that even if I get my ass kicked, the cops still probably won't believe me if the guy has, like, even two dots in Subterfuge, so... take shit and get my ass kicked?  Or take shit and kick some ass instead?  It's a choice I hate contemplating... but it's a choice I make every time I use a public restroom.

And that's just for existing.  If I tried to use the proper restroom?  The odds of an attack go up.

So... yeesh.  That's just kinda the "background noise" of my life as a trans woman who also happens to be specifically trained in kicking four flavors of ass, and loves to do it, but doesn't want to have to.  Like, I would love nothing more than to live secure in the knowledge that I will never ever have to fight again.  But... I might have to fight again, one unlucky day; and I might get killed if I can't adequately defend myself; and I'll be damned if I let the world kill me over bullshit; and I might be taken down by the legal system, no matter what happens, just the same.

Well, anyway, we get down here to the Blasted Southlands, after eighteen hours on the road (only one of which I slept - Lady M was kind enough to take an hour so I could nap after we watched the sunrise together).  These eighteen hours of road time, in their turn, followed two full business days of shenanigans from all and sundry corners.  So my tank is running on empty.  I take a shower, and that helps.  Lady M gives me some argan oil for my hair, which is lovely.  And her mom's friend Y comes over.  Now... Y is a fine person.  I like her a lot, despite the fact that she lives in... "the Blasted Southlands."

But she can't shut up about "this new show on Netflix, have you heard of it?  It's called... uhh... The Witching."  No.  "Or is it The Watcher?"  Jesus.  "I'm pretty sure it was something like The Witch, though."

I ask her, coolly as I can, "Do you mean The Witcher?"

"YES!  THAT'S IT!"

"Oh, yeah, I've heard of it.  Is, uhh... is it any good?"

"Oh, my GAWD, it is so good!  Henry Cavill is just... UNF!  And the whole thing, it's just... so great!"

"Huh, cool," I say.  "I'll have to check it out."

We end up watching the first episode of The Witcher, with which of course I am intimately familiar, even to the point of spotting that Y inadvertently made Penny Arcade's joke all over again.  Oof, that takes me back.  Anyway.  I watch this pilot.  And...

...it's pretty good.  Like, there's some ham-handed bits, but I can tell the shape of the beats they're supposed to be, and I'm a 35-year-old writer, educator, and storyteller who worked as a teenager at Blockbuster Video where they force you to rent videos all the time for product knowledge, and you can't do everything well.  I mean, look at me, even if I'm somehow possibly great at every single thing I do, I don't edit video at all, so I should be forgiving if I know what they're trying to go for but it doesn't quite hit home with me even though it almost does.  Principle of Charity, right?

But... like... the reluctant fighter.  Tell me one I haven't heard before.  Monster slayer, yeah, that's like the whole conceit of the game.  I get it.  Yup, the tough-talking chica turns out to be a mini-Big-Bad, duh.  Subversion of expectations, yeah, this is a medieval world where might makes right and a guy who is good at what he does but can't get involved in disputes over what good "is," yeah, that's a compelling through-line.  Oh, and of course he bangs the Big Bad chica, this is Geralt of Rivia we're talking about, after all.

OK, so we're like 3/4 through, and I'd give it... 3/4 stars?  Visuals, atmosphere, sound design, top-notch!  Writing, pretty good.  Plot arc?  Standard... but standard for the series, which is pretty high up on the video-game-to-screen-worthiness chart.  Solid C, 75%.

Then the combat happens.

And I come alive.

Intellectually, I know it's over in like two minutes (before he goes up against Renfri).  But for me, every move was a symphony:  Cavill turns to face the guy, dodges and/or parries the blow, does a slidey-thing with his own blade, turns it into a strike, maybe it hits home, but lather-rinse-repeat, limbs fly, and holy shit I'm trained to do that kind of thing.  Like, in Bujinkan, every block is a strike.  Every parry is a strike.  Every strike is two strikes.  I feel like I'm exaggerating... but I'm not?  Like?  The parts of the body I'm trained to aim for, there are inexorable leverage and body mechanics principles that will make the move work.  But also, there are pressure points that we are A. shown how to find, B. taught to harden in our own bodies, and C. trained specifically to strike in others' bodies.  So, like, watching Geralt of Rivia tear these guys apart?  Those poor peasants.  But... Geralt... would you, uh, like to wrestle?  I don't even like dudes, I just admire the way you move!

And then yes, the political complication, the ambiguity (did Renfri manipulate the townspeople, or Geralt, or both, or neither?  WHO CAN ANSWER SUCH QUESTIONS?!), the wizard is just a fucker, can we all agree on that?

Look.  Episode over.  I gotta write a blog post.  I step out back for a smoke with Lady M.  What the Hell am I going to do?

"Whatcha thinkin' about, Love?"

Deep sigh.  "Oof.  What I'm going to blog about today."

"Well, it's getting late.  What are you feeling?"

"I'm feeling a lot of things."

Challenging stare from her.  "Can you write them down?"

"Look... it's complicated... it's a lot... and it gets into my childhood, and the bathroom stuff, and friggin' somehow The Witcher, too.  Look, today has been a long day."

Knowing nod from her.  "So can you write about that?"

"I mean..." half-commital shrug?  "It's kinda dark, for Christmas Eve, don't you think?"

"Well," she says, taking a reflective drag, "Christmas is a dark time of year."

And... I feel seen.  I feel content.  I feel happy.  All this other stuff?  Sure, I can write about it at some length, but... it's just background noise.

I'm happy with my life.