Tag Archives: Health

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Trans Day of 💉💃🏻

Shortly after I took this photo, I shot a small bubble of air into my butt ’cos, in breaking my rhythm to take a photo of me having my regular shot, I forgot to do the final syringe flick and spritz a drop out. No biggie.

I fucking love giving myself a slightly-more frequent than weekly shot. Since I was told injections were available again, and once I’d persuaded my endo to prescribe them, I’ve been building up a stash. Seven weeks ago, I prepped and stuck a needle into the correct spot in my arse, and fuck me if this tiny vial of oily clear goo isn’t the shit. Injections always worked better for me, as proved by my boobs growing a cup in the last weeks (and my nipples feeling like the day after the day after a heavy nipple torture session). And it occurred to me, conversely, all the problems I had with pills and, to a lesser degree, gel is because that shit does not work. I also fucking love that something so unremarkable as this can literally change my sex. Yes, it can, cunts. Go educate yourselves if you just went all, “But nah something gender something sex can’t be changed.” Truth, it’s more like without this my sex does not have the chemicals it needs, but sex-change sounds so science-fiction.

Anyway, this photo was taken on Trans Day of Visibility, which for real I do not have the fucking patience for, cis people jizzing their ‘I’m an ally’ crap and so rarely turning up with actual material value. Except for Ariana Grande, who’s ponying up 1.5 million dollars to help support trans youth. Queen right there.

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Volkspark Rehburg Plötzensee

I planned to bike along Saatwinklerdamm like I used to do before cyclocross fun in Flughafen Wald. But, realistically, two days after getting booster vacced, 16km of riding and 2 hours of walking felt a little ambitious. So I biked 15 minutes to Plötzensee, walked the east side of that, through the park to Schwarzer Graben and along to the NFL field and Hall of Fame Wedding, back the way I came alongside the canal, back the other way again between the Kolonie Plötzensee, with its garden houses bigger than the places I grew up in on one side and the cemetary on the other, back along Schwarzer Graben and did some random loops of actual Volkspark Rehburg where I got myself lost / turned around and got to walk both of the “I really want to go that way,” paths, which was pretty clever of me, and got back to Uferhallen just as the sunset was lighting up the chimney. Blue sky and sun too, everyone standing around pointing their faces at it like they’d forgotten what it was.

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Volkspark Rehburg Winter

I used to blast through Volkspark Rehburg on my way to doing cyclocross in what I always called Flughafen Wald — which is actually Jungfernheide Forst, but people confuse that with Volkspark Jungfernheide on the south side of the canal, and there’s a lake called Flughafen See at the eastern end of the Forst, so … Flughafen Wald. There’s an enclosure for wild boars at the western end of Rehburg, before the track goes through the Kleingarten (quite a few of which are bigger than my apartment and sitting on land bigger than the whole building I live in). I didn’t see any there, but the bare trees and drizzle and dim light were enough to feel I was out in the countryside and not a 15 minute walk to Müllerstraße.

I’m staying in Wedding for a few days, at Dasniya’s studio in Uferhallen, where I lived with her for five years. It’s nice being back (except for the upstairs neighbour, which is a whole other convo about why older white cishet German women are so much work), and the closest thing I’ll have to a holiday this pandemic. I planned to bike to get vaccinated, but it’s been raining and it’s easier to wash shoes than hose down and re-lube a bike. Walking then, the one thing I can still do four months into some weird round of chronic fatigue symptoms, which could be anything from a fucked neck to depression to just needing a month of getting fucked.

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Tempelhofer Feld Pushing Towards Winter

This is so very Berlin, dim overcast light, grey and washed-out colour that has an austere intensity, not raining but damp and the air is soft with drizzle. It feels like being in the mountains or heath, far from people, walking and walking. My home is my International Orange hardshell, the brightest and most vibrant colour on the airport field, warm and dry and shielded from the wind. This, with tramping boots and a backpack, is something I miss and something that works deeply in calming my hectic inner life. I like the vastness of the land reducing me to this small, solitary thing, walking, walking.

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There have been too few works written about the va…

There have been too few works written about the value of service work and of housework in particular. […] Yet there are few feminist studies that examine the extent to which well-done housework contributes to individual well-being, promotes the development of aesthetics, or aids in the reduction of stress. By learning housework, children and adults accept responsibility for ordering their material reality. They learn to appreciate and care for their surroundings. Since so many male children are not taught housework, they grow to maturity with no respect for their environment and often lack the know-how to take care of themselves and their households. They have been allowed to cultivate an unnecessary dependence on women in their domestic lives, and, as a result of this dependence are sometimes unable to develop a healthy sense of autonomy. Girl children, though usually compelled to do housework, are usually taught to see it as demeaning and degrading. These attitudes lead them to hate doing housework and deprive them of the personal satisfaction that they could feel as they accomplish these necessary tasks. They grow to maturity with the attitude that most work, not just housework, is drudgery, and spent their time fantasizing about lives in which they do not do work, especially service work. Were they taught to value housework, they might approach all work differently. They might see work as an affirmation of one’s identity rather than a negation.

Feminist Theory: from margin to center. Ch 7. Rethinking the Nature of Work p. 104, bell hooks

bell hooks has been around since my early- / mid-teens first contact with feminism. I didn't pay much attention to her at first, not seeing how she was relevant. That's the smallness and limits of my upbringing showing there. A while later, in the noise of Paris is Burning touring the world's film festivals while the stars struggled to make rent, hooks had opinions on Venus Extravaganza that were disappointingly and unsurprisingly 2nd Wave. There was a long gap before I read her again, though she was always around. In 2013, a few months after I re-read Feminist Theory: from margin to center she hung out with Janet Mock and read her autobiography; in 2014 she had a dialogue with Laverne Cox at The New School. I felt she was someone from that generation who'd put it together a little better, and if Janet and Laverne and all the other Black trans femmes could be in the same room as her and share their love for her, I could move on from her remarks 20 years previously. We all gotta be allowed to grow a little. (But that doesn't give her a pass to come for Beyoncé.)

bell hooks passed over to Ancestor space earlier today.

The first thing I thought of was her writing on domestic work in Feminist Theory. I've quoted her (and often Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak on the same subject at the same time) to probably everyone I know if we ever had a conversation about housework. The quote continues after this, and like a lot of her writing I thought it became dogmatic and made some improbable conjectures. But that's bell hooks. She was this brilliant, Black feminist theorist who understood why housework was so important, who was loved by Janet and Laverne and Raquel Wells and so many Black trans femmes and mascs, and in turn worked to earn their respect and love, and whose opinions over the years, from Paris is Burning to Beyoncé were occasionally of a different era and different feminism and occasionally shite.

I love doing housework, cooking and cleaning, and while I'm on my knees mopping the floor feeling like it's not at all demeaning or degrading or drudgery, I'm thinking, "Yeah, doing aesthetics here, care for self and the world, it's beauty and it's got value," and bell hooks is nodding going, "Yes, child, affirmation of your identity coming through strong."

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Tempelhofer Feld Kestrel

Kestrel finally allowed me to take a video of them hunting.

Heaps windy and fresh after the storm last night. Me doing my usual wobbly lap along the southern pavé saw a crow having a go at a Kestrel. Kestrel was not having that and making a right racket. They both ended up perched on the bird sanctuary fence as I was walking past. I asked the crow, “Why you being such a cunt?” Kestrel flew off when I was between them and crow, and crow didn’t want to fly through me to get at them so hauled off in the other direction. Probably gonna have to give that one a feed so they don’t tell all their mates to shit on me next time.

On the gravel by the old airport ground this one was on the hunt. Maybe the same one. There’s a few of them there. Actually hung around long enough for me to get my phone out and then came up right over me for a long hover before diving at a mouse or something.

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Tempelhofer Feld Plant Life

Really not blogging much since the utterly brilliant pandemic response murdered all the fun and way too many good people. Everyone I know has been experiencing highly abstracted perceptions of time. Did we talk last week? Last week was last year.

Tempelhofer Feld has been giving me some low energy pleasure. The resident kestrels even took a perch near me for long enough I could photograph one the other day.

The only thing not giving me energy are the white cishet couples where the woman does the “Oooh it’s a tranny!” to her man. Big sucking the dick of your oppressor energy there, hun. I was wondering if they do this because if I respond to the woman, she can use the “It’s a man!” defence to have her man do the physical violence. All fun, no consequences for these cishet women.

Yallah, a month ago, when it was still autumn-ish, I enjoyed the plant life around the southern perimeter road, just up the rise by the trees. I was going to prettify them a bit, but a month later obviously that’s not happening.

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Tempelhofer Feld Clocks Went Back

Not even going to pretend I have any chance of blogging anything other than photos of Tempelhofer Feld. Sunday and the first day of “might as well pretend we’re all fucked until Spring ’22” clocks went back and it gets dark before 17:00 now. Saw the Kestrel / Peregrine / Hawk / whatever the little one is out hunting again.

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Mid-Autumn

Sunset at Tempelhofer Feld under a tree along the perimeter road west of the north-east entrance. The blue sky was endlessly deep blue and the leaves a fractal hallucination for bare minutes as the sun went below the horizon.

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Tempelhofer Feld Storm Ignatz

Went for a walk yesterday afternoon, ended up at Tempelhofer Feld, ’cos of course, and got my insides blown clean by the incoming storm and listening to Kemistry & Storm’s 1996 Brighton Metalheadz set. Got soaked on the way home and bought a loaf of caraway bread which is the closest thing to Glick’s bagels in Balaclava I’ve had in a long time. Love me some proper weather.