Those are some powerful words. "Hi there." Two of the most powerful words I've learned. It means, "I'm here." It means "I'm here with you." It means, "We're together in this moment." It doesn't mean anything more than that. Lovers use those words. Enemies use those words right before one of them kills the other. Still, though, there it is: "Hi there."

I meant to message a user called Lisa Lynx. She's a Google+ user. I feel like I'm an old man, like Gandalf or Dumbledore. At work, they keep comparing me to young men like Harry Potter. Actually, I got a scar on my forehead errily similar to Potter's, and I've regretted it ever since. Maybe I am young. Maybe I am old. I'm just here, in this moment, writing this, then I'll be gone.

Hi there.

I finally found a very rare Sailor Moon wallscroll. Actually, I don't know if it's rare at all. All I know is I've had trouble finding it. So, it's rare from my frame of reference, even if it's rather common and worthless from another frame of reference. Now. every night, the Shitennou watch over me as I sleep. Those folks, Kunzite, Malachite, Jeadite, Zoicite. and Nephryte (there were four of them so there must have been an error at some point, but that's how these things go). use to work for Mamoru, a spirit who was associate with this planet. The rest is apochrypha. The point is that people often get wallscrolls of characters they admire or are attracted to. For me, the Shitennou are both.

Whoever you are, Lisa Lynx... well, a sidenode. I'm not a man! I tried it once. It didn't work out. I much prefer being a woman. So please don't judge me by the gender they assigned me at birth.

Of course, I could never know what the other is like. I was drunk on IRC last morning (night, but I think it was morning). I've been taking sleeping pills for too long, and I decided to stop. It's been difficult. There was this person named Sacha, and she was of the XX type. I said something, then she said something, then both of us got frustrated at each other. So, I said, completely out of frustration, knowing that it couldn't happen, secretly wishing in my heart it /would/ happen only because it would harm her and be advantageous to me, that I'd take all her periods. So she, out of pure frustration (again, there was a a lot of frustration. often, when we use the words "hi there" and experience a moment with another, we can often meet based on our frustration, sometimes to hate each other, sometimes to solve the problem), so Sacha says, "You can have them!"

It was just as simple as that. At least, I've read a lot of stories where it was as simple as that.

It didn't happen at first, so I added a complication to it when I saw her later that morning. Since I'm quitting sleeping pills, I told her that I couldn't take her periods until I had natural, unaided sleep.

Well, I've had that. Unfortunately, I was unable to take her periods. I remain physiologically, except for the organ between my ears, male. I won't be having a period this month. Instead she will. I wonder if she was as hopeful as I was that I would be having a period next month intead of her.

The point is, Lisa Lynx, please help me. Your response to my comment was encouraging, but the discussion's been closed. Perhaps tomorrow I'll figure out this Google+ thing and find a way to contact you. I just wanted some record that what you had written me was encouraging. Thank you!

Well, it's time for me to conclude this. I don't know how to contact you or that you might even want me to contact you. Perhaps I'm another "all men" to an "all women." Who knows who those too idiots are, "all men" and "all women" always fighting, eh? I sure as hell don't. I'm sorry.

Well, blessed be. Until next time.

What a dream boat. His name was Xavier, and I was high. When I'm high, I tend to forget that I'm supposed to be a guy. Female instincts take over, and I'm putty in the hands of a man named Xavier who has a sexy Brazillian accent and an aura of strong, confident yet quiet and peaceful machismo.

I don't know why, but my whole life I've had crush after crush on people who are Latino or Hispanic or both. There have even been a few Hispanic girls I've liked, if I can admit to being a little naughty.

It was a bad day today, and I slipped into a parallel universe. It's your universe, where I'm just another female, a female who was interested in computer programming from a young age. I remember his modestness, Xavier's. He showed me his beautiful baby girl and his proud son. I am sure that in his heart he does not love me, but he loves his wife, the mother of those children.

She is a good woman. In that parallel universe I sometimes slip into by accident, there are good women just as there are good men.

A man is wild, though, and a man from your world can tell when a stranger from my bleak world slips through the dimensional membrane, just a half a mllimetre in the W direction and jump to the left. Let's do the time warp again. In my world, they shame people like me with the Rocky Horror Picture Show.

In your world, I become a young woman of about 29, and Xavier was a young man of about 32. His accent enthralled me and hypnotized me. His eyes were so strong, and the way he held me was irresistable.

It turned out that some of the network problems we were having were due to a badly configured Cisco switch. If he hadn't pulled my petite hacker waist, still a virgin's, up to his strong abdomen, we might not have found the problem. He put things together I was saying, and then we kissed passonitely.

I suppose no matter what side of the dimensional divide I'm on, I need a man, a strong man. Xavier was my strong man earlier today. He was so gentle and so strong. If he had wanted, and his fingers at least wanted as they found their way to the button on my slacks, I would have been his.

I am so weak, so weak in the hands of strong men who speak Portugese or Spanish as a first language and English as a second. It's my linguist instinct. I want to learn. I want, I want, I want more than learning. I yearn, and I desire.

Then my phone rang, and I was pulled, dragged across the dimensional membrane. Xavier was sitting on the other side of the room, but this was a different Xavier. I had a different body, back in the transgendered body again, I was. I answered the phone. A pregnant woman had slammed the side of my car with her SUV door.

I despaired. Xavier, don't you remember me, the cute girl you called Gwen when you held me in your arms and kissed me so passionently? Please, Xavier, save me from this hell.

Xavier was engrossed in an explanation of a VMWare environment to Alex, my co-worker in the other universe.

Will I ever meet the Xavier who kissed me so intensely, pulled me to him and kissed me?

Something is wrong. Apparently I'm in a different parallel universe from the rest of you.

None of you would like women from my universe. Not men, not lesbians, not even heterosexual cisgendered women. Well, we have lesbians here, but I hate to disappoint you guys who fantasize about 3-ways, but like the rest of the women here, they're obese.

One time I was in your universe briefly. I was on the bus. That was before I owned a car. There were two females with a healthy body weight making out for most of the ride.

I also slipped into your universe a few times when I was a trucker, not unlike that priest that that good writer in Maine wrote about a few times, sai Callahan. Once I slipped into your universe along I-5 up the west coast. I took a small break at a rest area in Washington state, and I was amazed that there was also a busload of nearly teenage girls there. They weren't obese, and they got along with each other and showed such intelligence. It reminded me of myself when I was that age. Except the next year, something horrible happened to me, and my transformation into a monster started.

I don't know what went wrong. There was some big kerfuffle about classical music and Newton's Principia Mathematica being like rape. In this universe, that resonated with a lot of women. They said, "Hey, this is hard. But look, all I have to do is proposition a guy for sex and he'll do anything for me, including hard stuff like math." It was as if Malibu Stacey (or I suppose in your universe they call those dolls Barbie) gained 300 lbs and came to life.

They even have this show over here called the Andy Griffith Show. In one of the episodes, the women of the town had an issue they were concerned about, and instead of making rational arguments, they just refused to put out. And that was good enough to win the men over to their cause. Nobody had any higher ideological thoughts than sex.

I have never understood it.

Am I already dead? Is this purgatory, some kind of purely psychological version of Silent Hill without the special effects every first Sunday of the month when the city tests their civil defence sirens? If I had died already and were in purgatory, I'd hope that purgatory would at least have a special effects budget. Maybe it doesn't. Maybe with the economic downturn, they had to scrap the idea of a "dark side" purgatory and maybe they told Pyramid Head that he'd have to make due with a kitchen knife.

I'm supposed to be like Pyramid Head, and in this purgatory, all the ladies love Pyramid Head. And I suppose Pyramid Head loves those bloated, obese monstrosities.

I didn't want to be a monster. I just kind of turned into one. I watched it happen, but I was powerless to stop it. At times, I even thought that becoming a monster like Pyramid Head would be fun. Maybe some day I'd see what Pyramid Head sees in ladies that weigh 2-3 times as much as he does. That day never came.

I'm supposed to have AIDS, but I can't even do that right. Most women get a disease called "diabetes," which they view as a venerable sign of old age and wisdom. Sometimes I wish I could get AIDS. It's supposed to be a holy edict from on high purging monsters like me from the world.

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/02/26/1631213/dharun-ravi-trial-hate-crime-or-stupidity

I just wanted to take credit for modding down a good handful of comments in that thread for being skeptical that outing someone in a country where Rick Santorum is a serious contender for a major political machine's presidential candidacy could be problematic.

The trouble with suicide is that it's easy to blame the victim. That's also the trouble when something bad happens because someone is expressing their homosexuality by doing something that's apparently so completely threatening to all of you like holding hands in public I modded down who pretend you have no problem with homosexuality, but it's just that you don't want it anywhere near you. You are afraid, and I don't know why because my experience in life has been completely different from yours. Only you in your heart of hearts can tell yourself why you find something like two guys holding hands in public or a guy talking about seeing a movie after work with his boyfriend so completely threatening that you'd suggest those things are just wrong and inappropriate.

Ok, put yourself in my shoes. Think about how the world looks to me. I can't tell you what the world looks like to a homosexual man, because I'm not a homosexual man, though. I was born with male genitals and a female brain. I don't know why, except for no other reason than biology is messy. I also like guys a lot more than girls, which is double-whammy because most girls like me are mostly lesbian. Do I want it to be that way? I don't know. It's just the way it is, and either I can fight it or I can accept it, because it's not changing.

Every day I have to listen to guys going on about their wives and girlfriends, and I have to listen to girls talking about their boyfriends and baby daddys and (on a blue moon) husbands. Apparently your instition of marriage is so broken that girls feel no compulsion in the slightest to get married before having children. I digress, though. I walk through a park and I see men-among-men holding hands with pretty girls.

This may be amazing to you, but I wish I didn't have to see and hear about everyone else's sex lives, either. Nobody has a problem with heterosexual cisgendered behavior. I just look the other way and maybe feel a little jealousy. Unless someone from a distance mistakes me as just another cisgendered girl with her boyfriend in a park, their ignorance will reduce me to my body parts and I'll be yet another one of those dirty homosexuals who should keep their sex lives and fetishes locked up in the bedroom. So, I just move on and let it go. Trying to get those people to confine their sex lives to their bedroom and not a hint of it anywhere else would be like beating back the tide.

It's not fair, but it's just the way it is. Maybe some day things could be different for another generation. That's why I'm not going to shut up about it.

Back to the suicide and hate crime issue.

It's super easy to say "look at me, I'm a big man and I wouldn't let something like that bother me. There must have been something wrong with him." Yeah, it's called being homosexual in a country that still believes that homosexuality is a mental illness that can be caught by being tempted into a wicked lifestyle and cured or prevented with sufficient virtue. Therefore, homosexuals are like suicides. They just simply lack some kind of virtue or character. Maybe their dads didn't make them mow the lawn and shovel the driveway enough when they were kids, right?

So, this is what it comes down to. I've been there before. Granted, it wasn't like that. It was just a stupid mistake of mine that outed me. I wasn't thinking at the time. When I first started HRT, it was an experiment, just a test. I was going to kill myself anyway, so I wasn't worried about if I developed a blood clot and had a fatal stroke on the 3rd day.

They'd just blame the liberals for killing their strong son and there'd be a lawsuit against the college, right? It's not like it could possibly be the fault of the people who failed to do the right thing and get me on estrogen and an androgen blocked when I was 10 so I might have a shot at living a full and somewhat normal life. Anyway, I digress yet again.

My plan was good and all. I just wanted so desperately to know what it felt like to be a girl, and I was fairly sure I was just going to kill myself anyway since I never could actually be a girl. HRT seemed close enough. They said my skin would get softer, I'd cry easier, and if I waited too long to kill myself, I'd start developing breasts like any other girl.

The only problem is that I forgot my credit card bill went to my parents' address as well as mine.

So, about a month later, they asked me if anything was wrong and why I'd made a purchase at a pharmacy.

Needing to come out before you're ready is hard. I was excommunicated from my family and informed that I was an abomination who'd been posessed by the devil and murdered their son. I guess I'm just spectacularly bad at killing myself.

That was a long time ago, though.

The point is all of you I modded down have no idea how much of an asshole you are. You've never been there, and you never will. You're lucky enough to be cisgendered and heterosexual. I wish I were lucky enough to make such insensitive comments without even realizing how much of an asshole I'm being, because I honestly wouldn't know if I were that lucky.

Maybe you should count your blessings before you open your mouth again.

Cheers.

P.S.

Ahh, stupid broken slashdot. I guess I can't preview any changes I make. Posting anyway. If you're a grammar nazi or want to attack me over a typo then LALALALALA I can't hear you.