Illustration Friday‘s theme this week is “Heroes”. Sometimes it just takes some determination and a will to speak up to be a hero, not be the biggest and baddest…

Insane idea of the minute: Curry lasagne.

I have always been obsessed with stories about transformation. I I spent much of my teen years seeking out books about people being changed in so many ways. I love the transformations in Dealing with Dragons, I Capture The Castle is one of the best books I’ve read more recently, about two girls going through th transformation of adolescence. I loved Ender’s Game as a coming-of-age story, children transformed into adults, and a world transformed by the end of a war. Treason, Isaac Asimov’s Robot novels, all of my favorites are in some way tied together this way.

My childhood favorite story was The Velveteen Rabbit. I didn’t read it often, nor listen to the audio tape my family owned often — it was a painful, powerful story to me, but one that’s shaped how I think in immeasurably deep ways. It still makes me cry every time I think about it, or the music comes on my random-play list.

Does anyone else have a theme to their favorites like this?

The most welcome sound in my life today: You have no messages. Press 0 to change voice mail options.. That was far too much work.

This town needs more tree and more cowbell.

The days where I get up at 7 go so much better than the days when I get up at 9:45. Wow.

Looking back, I should have realized I was trans a lot sooner.

I always had few friends — I really wanted to be one of the girls, but I wasn’t really one of them there. I didn’t want to hang out with the boys on the playground in elementary school. I was pretty sensitive as a kid, not itself a girly trait, but I think the feelings were starting then, and it was easy to upset me. My 11th birthday party was ice skating. I invited mostly girls. (I think my mom figured my hormones were kicking into gear. I really just wanted them to be friends outside of school, too.)

I’ve always gravitated toward situations where gender lines either don’t matter, or where I could slip into hanging out with the girls without being noticed. The theater company was good for that, the drama class at the high school was good for that, and the art classes I’ve taken were good for that, if relatively solitary most of the time.

It wasn’t until NBTSC that I really started developing relationships — the open, accepting atmosphere let me really be myself, or at least started me developing with no fear. Each year, I felt more like me and less like I was pretending.

Oh. And I’ve also had a strange propensity to end up with pink things with no effort on my part.

This was something I read every week at the Unitarian-Universalist congregation my family used to attend. It was on an unassuming bronze plaque, placed off to one side off the round hallway in the classroom half of the building, at the perfect height for a tall child such as myself to read as she passed.

Mostly for forecaster15 and the Portland crew, but anyone who cares to should look at some shots of the sky development in Portland this evening.

I am so tired but very happily so. I rolled out of bed at a very early 9am, met Ethan and Eric and Ruth at the coffeeshop. There was a hike planned that I didn’t know about, so we shortly left and headed for the hills to hike to the top of Mount Baldy. Notably, Mount Baldy is the only mountain visible from my house that doesn’t break treeline. Go figure on that one.

I filled the card on my camera, not that that takes much, and got a few good shots. I should give up on the panoramas for a while so I have enough flash to get really good at framing shots, but I didn’t today.

The hike was eight miles, and over 5000 vertical feet (counting the downs too). On the way home, I collected a half pound of stinging nettle for dinner, which is now sitting happily in my stomach as curry, along with some comfrey and marshmallow from the garden.

I had a rude awakening yesterday, talking to my father. My parents, on a scale of one to ten, usually rank somewhere right around nine. I didn’t pick up too many bad habits from them, they’re tolerant of most everything and truly accepting of nearly all of that. What I realized, though, is that my father has some very strange ideas of what mental health is. To quote him, “You’re not really mentally okay unless you can do it without medicines or anything”. It made me realize that there’s an all-natural 1 elitism that I used to share (this is why it bothers me so much, I think), and now reject.

This partly illustrates why they just Don’t Get the “transgender thing”.

1Remind me some time to give an earful on my thoughts on nature — for now, suffice it to say that I believe humans are a part of nature — all we do is natural. There’s nothing automatically better about something coming from plants or that existed before the 19th century or anything like that.

Arr. I will not get depressed right now, I have work to do. I will not!.

Sigh. I’ll do my best anyway.

Guadelupe molted again this week. This is her sitting on her rather large web.

is a decent try at capturing what I see when I look out from my balcony to the south.

Tagged by lightwalker, I have been instructed to list my six favorite songs. Alrighty then!

1. “Where you end”, by Moby. Not only do the words mean a lot to me and make me happy right now, but the music has this catchy bit that just makes me swoon.
2. “Approaching Pavonis Mons by Balloon”, by The Flaming Lips. I love the entire album, and half the songs have been among my favorites, but at the moment, this one is the one because of its simplicity.
3. “Heaven is a Halfpipe”, by OPM. Thanks upna.
4. “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”, by Deep Blue Something, though I prefer the acapella version I have, which is (probably incorrectly) attributed to Rockapella.
5. “Electroshock Faders”, by Hooverphonic, which I still cannot pin down why I love it so much. (The whole album of Blue Wonder Power Milk is really good, actually)
6. “Galileo”, by The Indigo Girls. lightwalker and I listened to this early in the morning at Quo Vadis while cooking breakfast and realized that we could actually get along and be friends.

Now, to tag some people. I’d love to see this list from zinniazayda, raijna, lypanov, aplaceofbirches, costmary and whisperchild. I’d also love to see you say why you love those songs.