lilitu23

The job interview at the cat clinic yesterday went very well. The interviewer was friendly and did not ask any confrontational questions. I represented my competence and merits as a worker in a good way, and I think I may be called back for a second interview. I believe I would like to get this job, but I am not attached to the outcome. If I don't get hired at this place, someone else will hire me somewhere down the road. It might not be a job I want. Time will tell. All I can do is to try to act with integrity and prudence, and I can't control what kind of response I will get from others. One thing I think is clear. I am finished in the retail grocery business, at least in this metropolitan area. I've been applying at all the natural food stores in the city for years and have got nothing but rejection. That is done and finished.

I talked to my physician on the phone this morning, and she informed me that my lab results are A-OK, no indications of any organic ill effects of the hormone meds I've been taking. However, I am stopping the spironolactone, due to the negative impact it has had on my libido and mood. I can live with losing my appetite for sex, but I am not willing to live with increasingly crippling depression and social anxiety. I can expect my testosterone level to rise and hopefully my mood will rise with it. I think I will continue on with the estradiol (maybe even boost the dose) for a couple weeks longer to see if that will have any effect. I thought that having estrogen would put me more in touch with my feelings but it has not done so (or if it has done so, the feelings have been masked by depression). I don't even know what I'm expecting from taking female hormones at this point, but I am still curious. I don't want to transition to living as a female. I don't really want to grow breasts. I just want to go back into the closet, and go back to being off the radar. The idea of me becoming a woman has been nothing more than a sad fraud, a ridiculous affectation, and a vain conceit. Friends who have seen me cross dressing and wearing makeup over these last few months will see me back in my normal men's wear as if nothing ever happened. And if they ask me, "Hey, what was that girly stuff all about?" I will just have to abashedly confess that it was all 'just a phase.' Call it "temporary insanity."

Last night I dreamed I was going to get my nipples pierced (they are already pierced, in truth, and have been so since 1990) at a piercing studio and this big flaming femme Scandinavian gay male piercer was going to do the job. As it happened, he or I had selected the wrong kind of jewelry, and I hated the design of the rings with wooden dowels that covered the nipples, so I frantically arranged to purchase different nipple rings, solid gold, emptying out my bank account and using my credit card to pay for it all. In another dream, I was at some gender support group meeting. There were several cute little dyke girls there, one of whom I was especially attracted to. I became preoccupied with following a pair of hairless albino cats around the room and under one of the benches on which many of the girls and women were seated.

And yesterday I spent the entire day watching one of the most haunting and disturbing movies I have ever seen, entitled Satantango and directed by the Hungarian Bela Tarr. The movie lasts seven hours and takes up three DVD discs, and I watched it all in its entirety, with two breaks. Words can't do justice to what this movie is about and the spell it casts. This film makes Eraserhead look like a Walt Disney picture. Some of the scenes were unbearably painful to look at, some were indescribably sad and beautiful. Sad and beautiful: I believe that is the best expression for my own personal aesthetic ideals. That is why I love the music of Angelo Badalamenti and Michael Cashmore so much. Sadness and beauty and mystery. There you have my core trinity of what I most love and admire in any artistic expression. But Satantango, my Lord. It is one dire, dark vision indeed, cynical, dour and pessimistic, examining human vices and follies, religion and the church, politics and the state, apocalypse and Anti-Christ. The scene where a young girl torments and then poisons her pet cat was the hardest part to watch. According to the director, the cat was not actually harmed during the filming. But still. Another memorable scene is a very slow zoom in on an owl perched in a portal inside a ruined manor at night. You can't see what it is until it zooms in really close, and then you watch the owl perched there in such serenity and dignity. The feeling I had while watching it was a blend of reverence, terror, and deep sorrow. A movie such as this will only be appreciated by a very few. If anyone is interested in seeing it, I recommend starting with one of Bela Tarr's other movies such as Damnation or The Werckmeister Harmonies. Both are apocalyptic and similar in tone and locale and temperament and style, but they are customary in length, about two hours for a movie instead of seven. I can tell you, though, that I was never bored during the whole seven hours of Satantango.