She talked about living in the interstices of definition, defying it and longing for it or something similar, recognition of what she is, at any rate. “Look at me,” she half-invited, half-acknowledged. “I’m not a woman.” Then smirked, “I’m not a man, either.”

I mean, I’ve known for a long time that gender is a continuum, but I’d never been in the presence of someone so fluid, so grounded, so kind and generous and loving after having been through a hell of haze and doubts and danger — because we beat and kill and damage transgendered people, because we fear the absence of neat little boxes — that I’ll only ever imagine.

The end of her evening’s performance took me by surprise, and I stood there with Michel, shell-shocked, at words’ end. Later we talked with Kate for a few minutes, and I must’ve articulated something or other well, because she asked me if I was a writer. The question took me aback, and I spent most of the rest of the evening composing this post in my head, but that was weeks ago and is lost to time. Now I dust off dim recollections to make them shiny again for a moment.

This is why I don’t think of myself as a writer: to me, that identification comes with a need to write, and what I have is the occasional need to cook.

Been cooking… some. In the last month I’ve made kickass chocolate pudding (for the first time ever; what took me so long?), water chestnuts wrapped in bacon (thank you, fellow party goer, for the idea), bacon wrapped asiago stuffed dates (ditto), and a bunch of unremarkable meals, some involving bacon. I need a challenge involving reasonably priced ingredients.

Thanksgiving, though, oh! It was perfect. I dislike the holiday, I think it puts gratitude in bad historical company, but this year it was exactly right. Four of us, just my brother, sister IL, nephew and me. (Mom opted to stay in MA, as she and her partner were taking off for warmer places that weekend.)

We had no dinner table. We had things in the oven and other things on the grill, and no timing congruency at all. We ate food as it got done, cooked with wine glasses in hand and chatted. All evening. Then we spent most of the rest of the weekend sitting by the fire with tasty drinks, mustard seeds, mortars and pestles, other fiddly food tasks such as scraping out a dozen roasted squashes, and ice cream. It was pretty much my idea of idyll.

Work is the kind of chaos that makes you throw your hands up in the air and go with it.

Winter is undeniably here, in my ribcage. Copious amounts of vitamin D help a surprising amount, but winter still sucks.

Still, Equinox (wedding anniversary) is past, and November 17 (the day my marriage was pronounced dead) is gone, and we’re fumbling towards Solstice. Strange, that in only two weeks the days will start growing again. Autumn lasted so long that wintry weather is really only just beginning. The time of long sleep, warm blankets and tiny LEDs is upon us.

This Saturday evening is the Wolf Moon – February’s full moon. No better time to go visit the ocean, I say.

If you were going to the ocean somewhere in the vicinity of Boston, somewhere wildish, where you can stand on a beach and not have a road twenty feet behind you, where would you go? I’ll be car-enabled.

(LJ readers, please to respond directly on Words’ End. Thank you!)

Somehow, New Year’s didn’t get touched by this. It makes sense emotionally, but not logically – how is it that I deeply, viscerally relate to both? And I decided that they’re different markers. The Solstice is, for me, a turning point in the natural cycle. I move within it, and with it, and am happier following a moon calendar that changes ever so slightly to keep in tune with the planets and star and galaxy around us. Solstice/Yule is a social thing only because I happen to be surrounded by people who keep time by it, too, and for some of whom it is – as it is for me – a holy day. Not all of us have that privilege, and I’m thankful to live where I live.

New Year’s is a social thing in a larger sense. I’m part of a larger human community that keeps a 365ish-day calendar, and that by and large marks the midnight of December 31st into January 1st. I’ve taken part in that since I was little, staying up past midnight for the first time when I was six or so. (And stayed up until 6am! I should ask my mom exactly how insufferable I was the next day. If she doesn’t remember, that’s probably a good sign.)

Tonight I was with acquaintances and beloveds, eating good food and drinking goofy-making drinks and enjoying my brand-blue hair and petting the love cat, talking, listening, taking it all in. At midnight I was napping in a warm happy bed upstairs from the party. The new year is here, and it is welcome. My personal newest chapter began over a week ago; but the passing of 2008 actually closed the previous one. Couldn’t have happened soon enough.

Good night, fellow humans. Happy new year.

First I was at home, and I knew that sleeping here were also Molly and David, and AndyB, and some other people. (I know all of them in waking life, but don’t live with any of them.) They were all in a… band? Maybe in the band. I knew that the three of them and some others were going on a road trip when they woke up, and I distinctly remembered Molly saying to the some-others something to the effect of, y’all do what you want, but I am going to follow Andy up the river; he knows where all the good eating places are. I thought that maybe I should point them to a place I went to, up the river, but my diary entry for that place was more about the presentation, the good hostess who looked like a dancer, the pink tutu she was wearing, and a good but unremarkable meal. I decided against telling them; they might as well seek out remarkable meals, plus they were sleeping, plus there were bedding sheets in the fridge, which I didn’t understand and thought, maybe someone was having a fever, so I shouldn’t disturb them.

Next thing I know, we (who’s we? I don’t know, except Andy was there.) were in a big field; I feel like I knew where, and maybe it was even along the up-the-river route. At least part of it was a corn field, except the corn plants were all dead for the season and all the corn had been picked, and also the plants were in neat rows with trellises supporting them, which isn’t like any corn field I’ve ever seen. There were a few cobs left here and there, though ultimately I only found one. As soon as we plucked it, to bring to the… place where we were staying? as contribution for dinner maybe?… a monstrous vaguely-human was running right towards us. There appeared a… not exactly a worm, but something similar yet unmoving, at our feet. Andy, whose head seems in real life to be filled with obscure but vital information that comes in handy in a large variety of situations, told us to kill the monster by chopping up the worm. So we did. We chopped it up into little pieces with an ax. (?!) But then I was all alone, and more of those not-quite-zombies were running fast toward me, and there were three worms at my feet, and they were so tough that they wouldn’t break apart, and so I got surrounded.

A woman monster looked closely at me, and I said, please, just make it quick. She told her companions something like, this one’s mine, and amazingly they seemed to lose interest in me, though continued standing around. The woman monster started spinning round and round, presumably to transform into something that could more conveniently tear me limb from limb, and I realized that this was my only chance, and ran like hell. Nobody stopped me, because everyone had lost interest and the woman was busy transforming.

Then I woke up with a purring kitty on my chest and an asthma flare-up. Took some albuterol and wrote this down. Strange and seemingly disconnected from everything I’ve been thinking about lately.

Dear American:

I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude.

I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.

I am working with Mr. Phil Gram, lobbyist for UBS, who will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a Senator, you may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the 1990s. This transaction is 100% safe.

This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check. We need the funds as quickly as possible. We cannot directly transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred.

Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA and college fund account numbers and those of your children and grandchildren to wallstreetbailout@treasury.gov so that we may transfer your commission for this transaction. After I receive that information, I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the funds.

Yours Faithfully Minister of Treasury Paulson

Don’t be drinking anything when you watch this, and oh, do watch it. Four-ish minutes.

It’s not even 10pm, and I’m already in bed in pursuit of enough sleep. A couple of days ago Mark and I talked about the concept of enough, for the most part agreeing that it was not a useful measure. When does the lovingest cat in the world (who happens to live with Mark) get enough love? What is enough contentment? How much time on the playa is enough? And so on. Since that conversation I’ve thought of two things to which I can usefully apply the modifier enough: food and sleep. My body definitely has a range of “enough” when it comes to nutrition, and lately I’m glad to say I’ve mostly stayed in that range. Likewise with sleep. Too much sleep, which makes me logy, happily doesn’t happen often. But before the trip I was underslept for weeks with only occasional breaks, and every such period takes a heavier toll than the one before it. One of the unmistakable signs of aging.

(Yes, I know I’m only 31. I said aging, not getting old, and this isn’t even a complaint: I’m just fascinated with the changes my body is patently undergoing.)

I got a surprisingly decent amount of sleep at Burning Man. The noise doesn’t bother my lucky brain, which can wander off into dreamland under most any conditions if it’s tired enough. And the weather between the Monday and Saturday dust storms was so mild that the tents didn’t get stifling until well after 9! Both of the times I’ve been to the playa before, the beating sun made it difficult to stay in the tents around 7:30.

Tuesday night was a night for wandering, though. I went out with some of my campmates, maybe a group of eight? We were – oh wait, do you know what the city looks like? Here, take a look at the map – we were camped at almost-9 o’clock and A, riiight around the round 9:00 Plaza. We went straight across the playa, past the Man, and to 3:00; that alone is a 5400-foot walk right there, just over a mile. We then proceeded to walk the diameter of the Esplanade all the way around clockwise, back to 9:00. There were sparkly and shiny things everywhere; many of those things were faces. We saw … actually, I don’t remember what-all we saw. I remember the feeling of it, but not the camps and installations themselves. Campmates, help in comments? :)

Around 8:30 I broke off with my friends and walked into a full-on techno-y disco, in an attempt to find Sean. Failed miserably at that, but did find two other friends – Rob and Sara(h?) – who had both made these gorgeous faux-fur coats rippling all over with LEDs sewn into them. Gorgeous.

Walked back into camp, recouped and realized that my evening was very much not over. So I got to wander the playa for a couple of hours with Dan. This was fantastic: Dan lives in San Francisco, and I don’t get to see him a whole lot; and the little time we’ve actually spent together is somehow always graced with an ease that I love. Plus, he has an incredible eye for visual composition.

We wandered through a small forest of skis, which surrounded a little meditation space with benches made of snowboards: a beautiful memorial to a skiing-and-snowboarding dude by his friends. And we found the balloons!

The balloons were surreal. There were three huge strings of them hanging more or less vertically in the air, lit up (it was nighttime, after all) – blue, green and red. The playa messes with your sense of geographical perspective at the best of times, and at night, slightly sleep deprived and giddy and not entirely sober, with all those lights around – well, we couldn’t really tell where the balloon strings met the earth. But toward them we went, and they turned out to not be very far away. Lucky us!

They were helium-filled balloons affixed to heavy-gauge kite string, with an LED taped to a small battery affixed under each balloon. They were twelve feet apart, and each string had hundreds of balloons, and more were being put on as we watched. They were so, so high up in the air – but you could catch the string and sort of walk it down with your hands; which is what people did, and we did too, and Dan even lay on the ground with some other folk who were passing them fire-brigade-style and laughing as though they’d been inhaling that helium. (They weren’t. It was just that fun.)

Why balloons, and why did we find them so fun, hanging out in the sky like that, 500 feet up in the air? For no better reason than people find horse races or museums or monster truck rallies or hiking in the woods fun. It was art we could play with. It was some of the best time I had on the playa this year.

If you are a major, Major University Press, can you please explain to me how it is that getting an academic journal sent to my workplace will result in my getting billed the institutional-subscription price, unless I am a professor? In other words: faculty can get a journal sent to them at their university, that’s ok, and they can pay at the individual-subscription rate. But if you’re a staff member, *UP assumes that your copy of their publication will be sent to an institutional library and then displayed there. So they charge you the institutional price.

…

While I was writing this and simultaneously on phone hold with the (very patient) customer service rep for *UP, she came back to tell me she’d received the OK to send the thing to my workplace but charge me just as if I were one person. Which I am. So all this works out! But why did it take twenty minutes?

I said don’t talk to me, laptop.

In short: on Wednesday the 20th of last month I left home absurdly early and drove westward to Black Rock City, NV. I took a northerly route on the way there and went through Ohio, Duluth MN, Fargo ND, Billings MT, Custer National Forest, Yellowstone and Jackson Hole WY. I got to the burn in the afternoon on Monday the 25th, stayed in the desert until stupid-early in the morning on Monday the 1st, and got home around 4:30pm last Sunday the 7th. On the way home I went south to Las Vegas, and then drove through Albuquerque and Santa Fe NM, Tulsa OK, Little Rock AR, Memphis and Nashville and Knocksville TN, Pretty Everyplace PA and Sleepy Hollow, NY. I drove a total of 7,253.5 miles in my friend Molly’s little 2001 Honda Civic Something Just-Pre-Hybrid, which was a complete doll and got me an average of around 45mpg. I was gone nineteen days (Stephen King, where are you?) (The number 19 carries a huge significance in the Dark Tower series); my cats expressed their unequivocal disgruntlement, and are currently over it.

It was exhausting and exhilarating and exactly the cathartic road trip I wanted. I saw some friends I hadn’t seen for a long time, met new and fantastic people, had the best burn yet (of my meager three), and spent a lot of time thinking and singing, sometimes at the same time.

Neuromancer is a bitch to experience as an audio book if you’ve never read the paper copy before. When I told Mark (who gave me the audiobook for the road) about the difficulty I was having understanding anything that was going on, and mentioned it was my first pass through the novel, he looked downright sheepish. I am glad to report that, after several false starts, I did listen to it all the way through, and am now listening to the whole thing again. It is brilliant and well read.

It’s 11:18pm, and i’m sleepy. Many more thoughts on each of the above-mentioned places.

More-or-less unrelated: going through my head right now, and all morning, is Peter Mulvey’s “On the Way Up.”

The cumulative effect of this: strange, unsettled, want to go to the ocean and sing to the waves. I wonder what new storm is around the corner – there is one – and whether this storm will inspire or blight.