Darkoshi

old dream

2025-08-30T03:19:45Z

I came across this description of a dream I had a couple years ago, while searching through my notes for something else, and found it uncommonly funny in retrospect.

Dream: I was with a group of people (coworkers?) given the opportunity to go skydiving (over Columbia?). The opportunity was presented on short notice while we were doing some other group activity. My first thought was sure, sounds fun. So I got into the small plane with everyone else and sat in a seat in the middle on the right side. The chair felt small and uncomfortably close to the window. I realized that I'm terrified of heights and I'd refuse to jump out of the plane once it got up high in the air. So as the door was closing I said I couldn't do it and asked to be let out. But I think it was too late; they didn't want to open the door again. So I thought that I'd just have to stay in the plane after everyone else jumped out. After waking up and thinking about it I realized there had been no mention of nor training on how to use a parachute first, nor were we given parachutes.

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It reminds me of the time in high school when I was standing on stage with other National Honor Society members and/or inductees. The speaker had been telling a story about being up in an airplane with the principal of the school, and I hadn't realized it was a joke until the punchline. Then, envisioning the principal jumping out of the plane without a parachute, I couldn't stop breaking out in (possibly well-concealed?) snorts of laughter for the rest of the ceremony. I didn't have anything against the principal, by the way, it just seemed so funny and incongruous.

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shaking ice flashback

2024-01-12T19:00:52Z

During most of my school years, I brought my own lunches to eat.
In the first few years, my mom fixed my lunchbox for me. Later I fixed my own lunches.
One school during the 5th grade was so close nearby that I could walk home for lunch (my memory is hazy, but I think that is what I did).
So I think it was at most two years that I ate the lunches that the school cafeterias provided.

Yet just now, shaking my almost-empty half-gallon carton of soymilk and hearing the distinctive sound of ice flakes sloshing around in the liquid gave me a flashback to those little half-pint cartons of milk that were part of the school lunches. They often had ice flakes in them like that.

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no pretty mask

2020-11-12T07:35:17Z

At Target a few weeks ago, they had a couple of racks near the entrance with cloth face-masks for sale. Not having seen that in a physical store before, I thought it was great and started browsing through them. But all the ones with pretty colors and patterns were for children, child-sized. The ones for adults were bland boring colors.

I saw a school bus drive by today and realized it's been so long since I've seen school buses. Unlike the past, I didn't hear a cacophony of children yelling as it went by. Though I'm not sure if I had the house windows open at the time or not.

My mom stopped by and talked to me on the porch. She had a cloth face mask on which kept slipping down under her nose. So I guess all those people you see on TV and in photos with masks under their noses aren't necessarily, maybe not even mainly, wearing them that way on purpose. Do they sell small clips that people could just snap onto ear loops to make them tighter? Or what else works well for that? On one of mine that was too loose, I sewed the loops tighter. On another I used safety pins. I suppose stapling them might work, if the straps are wide enough.

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Charleston County Sheriff's Election:

Kristin Graziano won a historic bid to unseat the longtime incumbent, Al Cannon, who has been sheriff in Charleston County since 1988. She is the first woman and first openly gay person elected to serve as a county sheriff in South Carolina.

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memory recall .... don't shake a stick at it, shake a spear

2017-07-07T04:07:58Z

Back in high school, we had to choose a scene from Macbeth, memorize it, and later recite it to the class. I chose one of the shortest scenes I could find, because, while I was good at remembering things, I wasn't particularly good at memorizing long strings of words.

I'm not sure if I ever recited it to the class; as much as I dreaded having to speak in front of the class, I usually ended up not having to do so. I never volunteered to go first (or 2nd or 3rd, or ever), and so the class usually ran out of time before getting to me. (Though in retrospect it would have been good to have more practice at public speaking. And it probably was a tiny bit of a let-down, getting all worked up at having to speak, and then not having to speak after all.)

As with the few other things I've memorized, I remembered it for a long time, because every so often I would recite it to myself. I didn't remember it perfectly - over time, I may have swapped in some wrong words here and there - but could still recite most of it.

Lately I had noticed that I could hardly remember any of it, except the first line. But this week at work, while standing at my desk, for some reason I started reciting it in my mind, and I remembered the whole thing again! The words flowed without a break.

Weird.*

It's the part with the witches talking, Act 3 Scene 5, that starts with "How did you dare to trade and traffic with Macbeth in riddles and affairs of death..."

But actually, reading that link, it turns out that in the intervening years, I had completely forgotten the 2nd half of it. I thought it ended with "thither he will come to [meet] his destiny". But I used to have the rest memorized too. "I am for the air" ... "my little spirit, see, Sits in a foggy cloud, and stays for me." Yep, I liked those parts!

Heh. And now I learn that the scene I memorized probably wasn't even written by Shakespeare. The above link describes the scene as "un-Shakespearean". This page says: "Some literary critics believe that these [sic] scene is way too hokey to be Shakespeare's work..."

Heh, hokey! You stick your left foot in, you stick your left foot out, you do the hokey-pokey and you shake it all about!

And that's another example of me remembering something, but not remembering it quite right.

*It's like how sometimes people's names are easy to recall, and sometimes not.

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pride

2014-06-12T05:08:48Z

At work, a corporate diversity email was sent out in honor of LGBT Pride month. I thought the sentiment was nice. It was similar to other ones we've gotten for African-American History month, and Hispanic-American pride, etc.

I heard a co-worker a few cubes away, however, joking/scoffing at the email. Saying she sometimes wished she could unsubscribe from all these corporate emails. "When are we going to get a heterosexual pride month?" Something dismissive of transsexual people. And then something like "I don't think we have anyone (LGBT) on this floor, do we?" (simply in a curious questioning tone).

The way she said all this didn't sound hateful to me; I could believe she doesn't really have anything against gay people. (And she probably has no experience with real trans people.) But it also sounded like she doesn't get it.

I started thinking that I could tell her that if she wanted to celebrate pride in her heterosexuality, that's fine. But the reason why LGBT people need Pride marches and such, is to counter-balance the shame, fear, and stigma they've grown up with.

Personally, my gender-neutral trans-ness and asexuality is mostly invisible to others, and I haven't encountered any such stigma myself. It's not something I feel a need to have pride in, nor is it something that I've ever felt bad or ashamed of.

But for gay and trans people who haven't been so lucky and who have faced hatred, bullying, and mocking during their lives, who've felt the need to hide their identity from others, the *pride* is necessary simply to offset that weight of negativity that they've encountered. It's necessary, simply to be able to feel good about themselves. And it's a way to share camaraderie with others.

It's not the same thing to be told, "you're gay and that's ok now, but don't flaunt it". Because not flaunting it can be interpreted as needing to hide it, as any expression of gayness can be interpreted as a flaunting thereof.

Anyway. I wasn't really planning to tell her all that; it simply crossed my mind. Then I thought, she's just reacting to an experience she's not used to; she'll get over it. Someday she'll get used to these kind of things, and that's part of the point of them.

Then I had the idea to send her an email telling her that yes there's someone LGBT on the floor, that I'm trans though probably not in any way she is familiar with. At that thought, my pulse started racing, and I could hear and feel the blood whooshing in my head*. I quickly decided that I couldn't compose any well written email in such a mental state. So I went out to lunch instead.

*Similar to what it used to do in school/college, whenever I seriously considered raising my hand to ask the teacher a question, or to comment on something. That's a big reason why I didn't do that very often; it was so very nerve-wracking.

I do however often feel that I'm not trans enough to call myself trans to others. That they'd say I'm not really trans. They'd deny my identity. (Or laugh and start thinking of me as weird.) They can't even conceive of it. So why even tell anyone?

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school fees

2014-03-24T03:06:10Z

I didn't realize that some public schools in the U.S. charge parents mandatory fees for each student. It seems to be common in Illinois. Up to $500 or more per student per year, although they are supposedly waived for low income families.

From what I remember of my own school years, there may have been various fees, but I think they were mainly for "optional" things like field trips, after-school activities, school photos & yearbook.

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