The name “Samantha Anne Stewart” has crossed my mind more than once recently.

Five might-have-beens

1. One in which I decided to persue theater. I go to New York at 17, and live poor for a few years. Several messy relationships with people I work with later, I finally give up on New York, move to a small town with a big theatre like Creed, and really get going. After that, head to college and take theater courses and a side in music. Get side-tracked in music and eventually become a permanent fixture at the school, half teaching, half studying. Then move on and study physics and music.

Live a long time in a house full of books and musical instruments, all meticulously disorganized.

2. One in which I wore a blue shirt instead of grey to Independence on May 5, 1995. I never got asked if I wanted a job. I ended up working in a restaurant, then cooking, then building things, then dying falling off a building during a dip in blood pressure.

3. One in which I fall in love with someone local, and end up having a kid early. We rent a series of apartments, then eventually move some place cheaper. We drive a beat up Celica, and struggle to make rent.

We eventually make ends meet, and buy our house. It’s thankfully next to the library, and I hide there whenever possible, reading all the time.

4. I realize that I am transsexual at fifteen, and I start on hormones early. At seventeen, you’d never know if I didn’t tell you. I manage to be successful at repairing computers, and I babysit sometimes. Camp changes me in wonderful and beautiful ways. I spend a good part of that year in a heap at the end of my bed, trying to figure out romance. I pay attention to my art, and it grows. I journal compulsively.

Eventually, I decide to hang out at university. I move to a nice city, Portland, perhaps, or Victoria or Montréal, or decide I want to go to London. I study music. I discover dance. I sing.

5. I start transitioning to being a girl early. It works fairly well, but something’s not quite right. I feel terrible and end up on some nasty drugs.

And some futures

1. I start selling DSL service. I find a niche giving rural people internet service, and expand. I eventually sell the parts I don’t want to maintain, keeping a small service for myself.

Carrie and I marry, and shortly after, buy land, and start building a cottage on it. We happen to have limited water rights, which we use to irrigate our garden. We live simply and well.

I hire someone to work while I travel, and we travel the world, starting in Ireland, then around Europe, then to Northern Africa, then Asia. We end up in the Pacific and stay a while.

2. I start taking hormones. My parents are only vaguely supportive, and living here in town has its ups and downs. I take the extra money I have coming in and travel. I make frequent stops in Portland, because having friends there is a good thing.

3. My blood pressure drops at an inopportune moment, and I fall down the stairs. I end up paralysed. (Have you ever wondered why I hold onto things tightly when I stand up?)

4. I go to MIT and learn in the AI Lab. I join the Logarhythms or the Toons, and sing a lot. Life is good. I’m one of the few girl geeks on the campus. I end up pasty from being indoors at too many hours. I take long walks around Boston, and eat too much palate-scorching Sichuan food.

That’s nine. That’s pretty tough to come up with without inventing your death to get out of it too often.

That was fun.

I just got back from a gallery opening, the Cimarron Art Glass company. I’ve been watching them get ready now for two months, and today they threw a good party and open house. Monroe is damn good with glass: his demo was making a blown rondelle, and the final stroke was to take the spherical vase shape, heat it up to glowing red at the top half, and then give it a quick spin facing the audience, who were rewarded by its opening up like a stop-motion film of a rose blooming.

The caterers were superb — I am entirely too full of cheese, including the brown Norse cheese that I can never remember the name of that I love.

I missed Frisbee to go, though, and I feel bad about that: Mary’s really been wanting to get a game on, and there haven’t been enough people.

Shelley was there, too, and she told me that two of Carrie’s necklaces have sold. Hooray!

Now off to work on projects.

In the past few weeks, I have:

• gotten to know Fiona and Jem a lot better,
• spent entire days basically alone,
• made projects work that I’ve been working on a long time,
• eaten home-made nachos that made Greyhound Nachos look really good,
• talked about British cooking,
• watched two couples break up, and get back together,
• sent the billing with no major errors,
• had people calling me with updated credit card numbers,
• missed Carrie,
• listened to a lot of Indigo Girls and Suzanee Vega,
• and done a lot of thinking.

I worked the store this evening for the first time in a long time. It felt really good to change mental gears and do something less brainy for once.

I miss Carrie. Ruth gets home just about now.

In other news, Liferea 0.5.1 is a good improvement on 0.5.0, and the new Cheddar we got at the store has turned out to be a particularly bland Process Cheese Product. It goes really well with the also surprisingly bland (read: low salt) Green Mountain Gringo tortilla strips. At least chips low in salt are acceptable.

I got coda working, on a modern kernel, with modern tools. Now just come cleaning up the init scripts and getting down to packaging the bad thing and I’ll be very, very happy. I have been working on this off and on for a long, long time now.

Dinner with Amro was excellent — pasta, sauce, bread, wine and juice. A feast, really. Now she’s dozing on the bed, wine making her sleepy, and I’m writing here. She’ll probably check her email soon. Life’s good.

I talked to Carrie a bit. Not enough. (Have you made a decision yet, love?) I’m glad she’s having fun.

I hiked to Blaine Basin with mom and dad. It was absolutely gorgeous. It’s springtime there in every possible way. We had the obligatory snowball fight. Mom is a sharpshooter. It’s about six miles round trip, and I’m out of shape so I’m tired. My feet hurt, too. I should really get some hiking boots at some point, but I don’t really want to spend $150 on shoes, when my everyday ones manage to show up at the thrift shop for $10.

Mom brought tabouleh, and it was salty enough for hungry hikers. Yum.

There was a beautiful waterfall, and lots of wildflowers, though most of them won’t bloom until July. There was an orchid-like thing that we’d never seen before, with fuscia petals and that really looked like it enjoyed the water.

Oddly enough, the bugs ate dad more than mom and I. He must be drinking less maté these days. It wasn’t bad, though. Just a few mosquitoes in Willow Swamp.

Now I’m arguing web design theory with FoolsRun and Polyergic. It’s good. We all want the impossible to various degrees.We never do get to the juicy stuff that I like, though, and that’s computer-aid processing. Things like auto-summary, header collection, and all the new things that would happen if all text were proper, clean, XHTML.

I did meet Sharlie on time. Her laptop is screwy, though, so I still have it. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll be able to fix it. Anyone know how to solve “Error 633” in Windows’ dial-up networking, assuming the obvious has been tried?

Then I went to Sandy’s for breakfast, since I got up about ten minutes before I had to be out of the house. Her hollandaise is to die for.

It rained off and on all day. Several good downpours. The garden is happy.

We have a good handful of strawberries ripening right now. Perhaps tomorrow they’ll be ready.

I’ve got my invoicing just about done for the month. There’s “only” 152 invoices that I had to flag for review tomorrow after I go hiking in Blaine Basin with mom and dad.

Brendan Eich wrote (and Joel Spolksy notes):

> What matters to web content authors is user agent market share. The way to crack that nut is not to encourage a few government and big company <q>easy marks</q> to go off on a new de-jure standards bender. That will only add to the mix of formats hiding behind firewalls and threatening to leak onto the Internet.

The best way to help the Web is to incrementally improve the existing web standards, with compatibility shims provided for IE, so that web content authors can actually deploy new formats interoperably.

I think this is dead on. IE has the market share. It will have it for some time. Does that mean we should give up? Skip SVG, because it’s too limited as IE implements it? Skip XForms, because a little DOM and JScript work works better in the short term?

I think not. IE is hackable. I think that even binary plugins are okay to do the work. ActiveX does let you do things that the Netscape plugin API does not: You can extend past the edges of that little grey box. Let’s make some shims. Let’s make them tough, durable, hard-to-knock-out-of-place, easy-to-install shims. Stop saying This page made for Mozilla, stop saying This page made for IE, and stop saying Standards compliant when what that really means is We use a subset of the standards because that’s what’s available. Let’s write a set, a coherent set, of ActiveX controls. Let’s package them up in a simple, one-click installer. Let’s make it as easy to install as Flash, and as compelling to do: Let’s make SVGs sing and dance. Let’s get Joe User to install the shim just to see that funny cartoon that his brother sent him. Let’s take advantage of viral marketing and tell-a-friend-about-this-site forms. It works. It’s worked for the history of the web.

And most importantly, let’s make this shim silently upgrade IE to do what everyone really wants, whether they know it or not: Support an interoperable, standard web.

In addition to that, I have a glass half full of wine and half full of juice. I have a fried egg sandwich with chili sauce and chutney. I have pasta with cherry-tomato and mushroom sauce.

I have anime music that I believe came from Zin.

It’s raining. There’s been a steady shower for almost an hour now. The clouds are the same grey color the cat who is curled up as tight as he can get in my lap, and have been all day. The air is cool and moist. The mountains are mostly hidden from view. The world looks happy this evening.

Carrie called yesterday — I was so worried when I heard her voice. I wasn’t expecting a call from Quo Vadis. She was, however, asking about the recipe to bagels. I can’t remember if I botched it or not. I was completely taken by surprise. She’s having a blast, which is taking a load off of my mind. There were several times before she left that she had to be cajoled into going.

I think I have my problem with the stereo pinned down. A bad speaker cable. I shall replace it in the morning.

Note to self: You have to be up at 8:45 tomorrow, to meet Sharlie and help her with her computer again. Do not screw this up. Do not oversleep. She’s been a great customer, and you got that nice table from her on credit. Now do her a favor and be there on time.

I had a most wonderful conversation with Jem last night. I stayed up way too late, and it was worth every bit of not being able to get up this morning.

It was nice to be able to talk about issues surrounding girlishness and lack thereof, and not have it be a weird thing to talk about.

Then, this morning, I talked to Fiona and that was good too.

I want more good conversations like that, darnit!

One of these days, I will get up enough emotional energy to actually think about what I wear in a day, rather than just using the first thing I find that’s reasonably clean.

It’s sad, I know, but so much of the time, I just don’t have the energy to deal with it. It doesn’t help that what I’d really love to wear, I don’t own and probably doesn’t come in my size.

Grr!

I just made my LJ page validate. Now if only there were some way to force everyone to use XHTML instead of HTML, so the friends page would.