The Best Time Of The Year!

I've had quite a few depressing or at least non-happy posts, so I really just wanted to post something that makes me happy.

Football.

Specifically, College Football.  Between early September and early January my attentions turn distinctly to watching and enjoying college football.  I'm specifically a fan of the University of Michigan, but that's equally paired with a simple love of the game.  Sure, I root against Michigan State and Ohio State when they play the Wolverines, but I root FOR those same teams when they are playing other people.

Let's specify first that I don't like professional football.  I don't watch the NFL, I don't root for the Detroit Lions, and I only watch the Super Bowl for the commercials.  I've asked myself on many occasions why that is, and I think I've come down to two specific reasons.  Amateurism, and the temporary nature of any good team in College.  For amateurism, I just love the fact that these guys aren't getting paid millions of dollars to go out and play a game.  If they don't make a particular play, there's no part of me wondering if they pulled back because of the possible loss of money.  Let's face it, if a player gets injured in the pros it might cost him millions of dollars on his next contract negotiation.  At the college level, these guys are putting everything on the line every time the play for the possibility of joining that millionaire's club. If they don't take that risk and make that play, they might not get drafted.  And most of the players at this level know they won't be professional athletes.  They're going to be business men, journalists, car salesmen, doctors.  They're playing more for the love of the game than for even the possibility of money.

Health Update

This is just a short post (I started with the intent of this being short... but I got wordy and it's not short any longer... sorry) to update on some of my ongoing health issues.  My two main problems since I first saw my doc in 2014 has been diabetes and migraines.

At the time I knew I had diabetes.  I had the classic symptoms.  I was thirsty and hungry all the time and I was constantly having to urinate due to me drinking so much (and I was drinking to quench the thirst that couldn't be quenched).  The doc did a blood test and my A1C came back firmly into the uncontrolled diabetes level.  Since then I've been taking daily blood sugars to track my diabetes while he put me on metformin, increased the metformin twice, put me on byetta, and then increased the byetta.

Outside of medication I made some changes to my life.  First and foremost I just simply tried to limit how many carbs I ate.  If there was a choice of bread or meat, I'd take the meat. If it was potatoes or beans, I'd take the beans.  Cookies or fruit?  Go for the fruit.  I didn't fully take the carbs out as I knew that would be near impossible for me.  I just love bread and potatoes and corn.  I was already self limiting sweets, but I never ever fully stopped eating them.  The next step was to pick my battles.  Everybody here should know by now that I live with my mother and am trying to help her out as much as I can.  Well one of her loves is cooking and baking.  I didn't even want to try and take that way from her or change her habits.  So I just ate whatever she put on the table for dinner.  As a wife and mother who came to age in the 70s, her cooking habits are firmly in the 'meat and potatoes' area.  She also had to fight cholesterol for my father in the 80s and 90s and beyond, so she limited the meat and focused on the potatoes and pastas.  So... yeah.  I get quite a bit of carbs from mom.  I still limit it... I eat less or no bread at dinner, I take extra helpings of the meat and less of the potatoes, but the menu is just not diabetes friendly.  So my battle would be where I could make the most impact.

Anticipating

You know... I love looking forward to things.  At this very moment (its about 7 AM, Saturday morning, November 4th) I am looking forward to my brother coming over and watching College Game Day.  I'm looking forward to possibly playing Dungeons and Dragons with my brother, nephews, and a friend this afternoon.  I'm looking forward to watching Michigan crush Minnesota this evening.  I'm looking forward to talking to my brother as we always find something interesting to discuss (a couple weeks ago it was white privilege!).  I'm looking forward to Sunday where I only have to do a bit of shopping and some laundry but is other wise a day off.  I'm looking forward to returning to work on Monday as I battled a migraine most of last week and work was just awful.  I'm looking forward to driving up north for a work meeting on Wednesday.  I'm looking forward to a three day weekend next weekend.  I'm looking forward to the Thanksgiving 4 day weekend.  I'm looking forward to Michigan Vs Ohio State.  I'm looking forward to Christmas.  I'm looking forward to Michigan's bowl game (can you tell that it's a football Saturday yet?).  I'm looking forward to the point where I can order my new phone and then receive it (the damned Pixel 2 XL black and white version has been out of stock since it went on pre-order back on October 4th!).  I'm looking forward to my birthday.  I'm looking forward to Mardi Gras.  I'm looking forward to having my credit cards paid down and maybe a Summer vacation.  I'm looking forward to a trip to Grand Rapids, a weekend in Chicago, and a trip up north (three trips in the nebulous planning stage with a friend).  I'm looking forward to Winter.  I'm looking forward to Spring.  I'm looking forward to Summer.  I'm looking forward to (next) Autumn.

This is not good

There are a lot of ways to self assess my situation.  I can look at my money, I can look at my job security, I can look at my leisure time (both how much of it I have and how much of it I use), I can look at my job, my job satisfaction, my dreams, my desires, and so much more.  And by most measures, I'm doing fine.

I mean, I have savings without sacrificing any wants, desires, or needs.  I have a career that lets me work just about anywhere, and am good at my current job.  I have quite a bit of 'time off', and have plans for get togethers with friends and family both big (Mardi Gras) and small (football Saturdays, D&D, setting up my friends cord cutting).

But that's kind of like looking at the graphic I have in the title and thinking that little cartoon dog is fine.  I mean, he's saying "This is Fine", he's smiling, he even has his jaunty little hat on.  Don't mind the obvious signs like the fire raging in the background... he's fine.  But you know he's not fine.  You know he's in trouble and he's putting on a brave face for some reason.  And that's me.  I'm not fine.  There are fires raging both external and internal that are making me not fine.  There's a smile on my face most of the time but it's forced and cracked and temporary at best.  I tell people that I'm fine, but I'm lying to them.  Because I'm not fine and I don't know how to express that to someone without it devolving into whining.

Hodgepodge

A couple things I want to 'muse' on.  President Trump, New Phone, Lack O Cash, Moving, Mom's Health, Weight V Size.  Really just a grab bag of topics, none really worthy of their own individual post.



President Trump

I don't like him.  I don't like him as a person or a politician.  But I don't think I can say I like or dislike his policies because I don't get the feeling that he has any real policies beyond Making America Great Again.  And no... I don't know what he means by that.  Let's cover all of that piece by piece.

Him as a person.  He's a twit.  He has a five year old's mentality.  If you insult him, he'll insult you back.  What ever he does is 'great' and probably the 'greatest' ever.  He cares about reviews.  Now I didn't like George W Bush as a person either.  I felt that he was honestly against intelligent discourse, but even with all the 'Wanted Dead Or Alive' stuff, he still came across as Presidential most of the time.  I don't remember him striking out against the press, individual press outlets, and certainly not against individual journalists.  I imagined him railing against all of these things in private, but he didn't let that seep into his public persona.  President Trump does and it seems to be getting us into trouble.  A perfect example of that is North Korea.  Can anybody honestly say his bombastic attempt at handling North Korea has caused them to step back their efforts at all?  Has it caused them to ratchet up their nuclear and missile tests? In that way, hasn't it also brought us closer to actual war?  I mean, at this point are we more or less likely for one of their tests to go horribly wrong and land a missile on Japan? Are we more or less likely for one of their jets to attack one of our jets?

Mom's Health

So yesterday I got all pissed off and pumped up and just had to write about the protests and patriotism.  I think one of the reasons I was so pissed though was family.  Mom is sick.  More sick than normal.  And I'm just about as worried about her as I've ever been.  Lemme set the stage a bit so you can understand my concern when I get back to the present.

My father died 10 years ago.  It was devastating to our entire family.  Family, to us anyway, is just about everything.  To this day I'm still striving to earn my father's pride.  As hard as it was for me to lose my father, it was ten times as hard for my mother to lose her husband.  They had plans to grow old and travel together.  To enjoy both their retirements and reap all the benefits they'd worked so hard for.  After the initial round of grief, I thought Mom would be okay as she started to travel with my aunt... her sister.  Mom and Aunt S have always been very close, and now that they were both widows, they became even closer.

Mom, at the time, was very healthy.  Sure, she had type 2 diabetes, and smoked, and had several other long standing problems, but she could get up and run with the best of them.  She was about 60 at the time and looking at her and her activity level would put her closer to 50.  Then she started having heart problems.  Over the course of a year she went into the cardiologist and had a bunch of tests and figured out that she needed to have a triple bypass.  Just to rush through this part, she had a bad recovery from the surgery and after another year of tests, they found out that none of the bypasses were viable.  They all failed.  And their best guess was that they failed soon after the surgery... so while mom was trying to recover from open heart surgery, she didn't have the improvement the bypasses were supposed to offer.

Unpatriotic Protest?

I guess it started with Colin Kirkpatrick.  Maybe it started earlier, but this is what brought it to my attention as well as the attention of most people I know.  You see, he wanted to protest.  He wanted to bring attention to something and he knew one of the best ways to get his message out to the most people was to do something shocking.  So he sat down during the national anthem.  After that game he said "I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder".

Later he switched from sitting to kneeling during the national anthem.  As he put it, he did this to show respect to show more respect to former and current U.S. military members while still protesting during the anthem.  At the time that this was going on, I couldn't have really cared less.  I caught it on the news, and saw a reaction of protesting his protest, but I figured it would blow over soon enough.  But my God... this has become an epidemic.  People seem to be losing their minds at the mere act of protesting during the national anthem and even more athletes are joining in.  People are crying because he can't seem to get hired on as a quarterback and say it's because of his protest, but it's also spreading to fans and even students in school.

And I'm left over here wondering what all the fuss is over.

She set's me free

So over at D+X I have an ongoing thread that I titled my "Playlist Diary".  I share music there that touches me.  Sometimes it's just how it touches the 'me' that's Caitlyn over there, while other times it's music that touches 'me' as in the person writing those posts out.  And even then, sometimes that author 'me' is male and sometimes it's 'female'.

But the underlying current in that thread is that I"m sharing music.  I'll sometimes write out a scene with me in character, and sometimes explaining how that particular song is affecting me in real life.

So today after I wrote up the previous post about going to New Orleans I wasn't feeling particularly 'Caitlynesque'.  I've been thinking recently that I might be slipping out of her mentality, so I wasn't too surprised.  Instead of moping about it, I just continued to focus on New Orleans.  I went to youtube and watched videos about the plane I'm going to take (MD-88), about checking luggage in at the airport, about both Detroit's and New Orleans's airports, and then on to watching videos about New Orleans itself.  I started watching one that was in a Video Log (Vlog?) format and had a musical montage in the beginning with a song that I hadn't heard before.

At first, it was just one of those songs that I don't particularly like.  It's chill.  Chill music normally doesn't do anything for me.  I think slower songs are fine for that mood, or even more upbeat songs that are kept quiet enough to be background music.  But this one... well, it changed me.  It washed over me in a way that left me feeling very feminine.  I started hearing bits of the lyrics and one in particular caught my ear...

Vacation Time!

So I'm fast approaching my next Vacation.  I'm so thankful that traveling has become a big part of my life.  From quick two day trips around my home state (Detroit, K-Zoo, Grand Rapids...), to weekends in the Windy City, to drives down to Dallas, to big trips down to Mexico.  In fact, it's become such an every day part of my life that I've now started mentally breaking them up.  Only a few years ago I would have looked at three days in Chicago as a full fledged Vacation.  I mean, it involved everything a vacation would have, right?  Travel (car? plane? train?), hotel (downtown?  boutique? cheap?), and things to do (touristy trips to the Sears Tower? revisiting the old neighborhood? going to the Art Institute?).  Heck, Detroit was about the same thing except for the travel as a car was the only obvious choice.

But now?  Honestly, that's a weekend trip.  It's fun and I want to do it as often as possible, but that really doesn't require a lot of planning.  Trips like that could be done at the drop of a hat so long as I have the days off, and really I could get most Friday's and Monday's off around my weekend so it's not even that much trouble there.  It's just a matter of having a friend that wants to do it and the cash in the account.  Dallas is a bit more of a trip as it does require either a plane ride or an extra four days to drive it.  But that's visiting friends.  I get to hang out with their family, maybe go to a school performance, get kicked in the nuts repeatedly by their dog, BBQ, check out my buddy's new guns... it's hanging out on a slightly bigger scale because we live so far apart.  It's not a vacation.

It's a Man's World

This may sound a little funny coming from me, but hear me out.  Why the fuck do I get automatic respect and credibility simply because I'm a man.  This is primarily related to work, but I see it in many aspects of my life.

A big part of my sexual fantasies involve forced feminzation.  Now there is of course a lot of variation in that particular fetish, but for me a big part of it is a power transference.  I'm a 'big powerful man' and I'm reduced to a 'small weak woman'.  The classic 1950s housewife and/or the classic 1960s office secretary.

So on one level, I get it.  But that's at the childish, base, me-tarzan-you-jane, me-hunt-you-gather, type level.  It's the same level that's racist and homophobic and just ridiculous.  For a sexual fantasy, it's fine.  For reality it's just stupid.  How does this apply to work?  Simple.  Nurses with years and years of experience still look to me for help.  They look to me to lead.  They automatically and regularly defer to my 'expertise', which in reality is limited to the fact that I have a penis.

Seriously.