Below are the most recent 4 friends' journal entries.

Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009
synergetic	7:36a	Transgender Body Stuff Over the past months, there have been a few issues with my body that were worrying me quite badly. I checked up a few of them with a doctor and have had some reassurance, although I think I may need more help on some of the others. The first set of problems seem to be stress related. Mainly, I tense up without realising it and this aggravates a whole host of injuries. The first one is always RSI in my hands and wrists. However, the next stage seems to be my knees, and they have been in real agony over the last week. I've noticed a tendency to push against the sides of my knees when tense (and potentially as a self-harming subconscious measure) so I've been trying to stop myself doing that and resting them up. The second set of problems seem to be hormone related. I've not even come close to starting hormone treatment yet, so my hormone level is all my own. However, I've felt that, to a small degree, I have the ability to influence my hormone level by my actions while, likewise my hormone levels influence my actions, all of it happening in a feedback circle which I can adjust. It's been useful, because it explains why I suddenly got less spotty all over my body after figuring out I was transgendered and I could push my hormones towards the feminine in order to see what it feels like and whether I'd like to start taking hormones permanently. Through it all, I've been quite worried whether this is actually something that is happening or whether it's something that is in my head because I want it to be true so badly. Science certainly supports that behaviour can influence hormones, my doctor thought it reasonable and my dad offered some supporting anecdotes from politics, but any friends I've spoken to about this, except Kathryn, think it's all in my head, so I decided that it had to be too, unless I felt confident to say otherwise. This turned out to be a really bad idea, as it was wrong for two reasons, which led to a lot of pain. The first was that, not only was there a link between hormones and behaviour, it didn't appear to be very small either. ( Cut for mild body descriptions ) The physical stuff doesn't even begin to address how I feel about the hormonal changes, which is the second reason. I expected that I'd be happy to have my hormone balance shift before it happened, only I've realised that every time my hormonal balance approached the feminine and crosses a line where it starts to affect how I'm behaving, and a positive feedback loop starts to develop, I've panicked and whacked it back across firmly. At first, I was scared that it was because I wasn't really transgender and sometimes I'd force myself in frustration, but then I realised that I did it for various reasons: I was scared and paranoid: once the feedback loop develops and becomes self-sustaining, I can't hide what I am any more and that's terrifying. Also, once the feedback loop gets underway, it takes away any choice from me. Finally, there's just coping with the feelings and sensations inspired by the hormones themselves, which are strange and foreign to me, and therefore stressful. All of this questions the fact that my subconscious is making anything up because I want it. Rather, it seems to be gibbering in fear. Recently the cycling of my hormones (and so emotions) back and forwards over that invisible line has started bothering me more than my fear. I feel like someone was dangling a cat toy in front of me and jerking it away, never letting me catch it but letting me get close. At least I let my cats catch the toy every so often. It was like my body and brain would start preparing themselves for female puberty and then suddenly they'd have it jerked away. That cycling is horrifically stressful, so I need to stop it anyway if I need to save my knees and my sanity. I've also noticed how silly being afraid is: the hormonal changes affecting my chest mean that if someone tries to hit it, I'll cross my arms over my chest in twin Vs before I can think about how it will look, so I'm screwed already on the paranoia front, and there are probably a few other things as well now that'll give me away. Also, having spent enough time getting used to all the various strange feelings makes them less strange and therefore less scary and less stressful to deal with. As the stress of the newness goes away, I'm finding my natural desire to act like gender I am takes over. And I'm just tired of being afraid. I've let my hormones cross over and stay crossed to see what would happen. So far, I've generally dealt with it, even if I've been exhausted by it. Current Music: See Saw - Kimi wa Boku ni Niteiru (Comment on this)
synergetic	6:04a	I is sleepy I've been sleeping a lot these last few days. My parents are even noticing. I feel like I've been doing enough to earn the level of tiredness making me fall asleep so much, even if I don't get to be up a lot. I think that the tiredness is mainly mental fallout from being on my own with my thoughts and then talking to someone about them, as my brain has this generally stretched out feeling that I associate with major emotional trauma, and I've been a bit emotionally unstable for the last couple of days. Unexplainably weepy, a bit snappy, that kind of thing. Despite that, I managed to get all the Christmas presents for everybody except my grandfather yesterday morning. The only reason I didn't get anything for my grandfather is that I think I'm going to get him a bottle of some kind of alcohol, and I wasn't near any shops that sold alcohol, so I want to do that today. Also finished WoT book 8, ( cut for spoilers ) I found the personal website of the person finishing of the WoT series, Brian Sanderson, author of the Mistborn trilogy, and he has a series of blog posts where he rereads each book in turn and posts about it here. It turns out I agree with a lot of what he says during my reread, so I thought I'd let his words speak for me. (Comment on this)
Sunday, December 20th, 2009
synergetic	5:35p	Perl Object Orientation I tried my hand at the first bit of Perl OO I've ever done. Also my second bit of Perl. My first was a script to shut down overheating nodes on a beowulf cluster, which sounds far more epic than it really was. I'm not convinced about Perl OO. It feels like a brutal hack. A logical hack, yes, but a brutal one. In Perl, you don't write a class, you write a package, and you can make that package have functions which take an object or a class as the first argument, if you want. If you do that, it nearly works the same as the class/object implementation in other high level languages (e.g. PHP). I'm also not convinced about Perl references. Perl allows you to use a reference in any place you'd use a scalar. What that means is that you can whack a reference inside an array or hash and get arrays of hashes and hashes of hashes and so on, nesting them however you want. however, it doesn't feel very natural when I compare it against PHP which has the mixed variable type, so a variable can be a scalar or an array/hash (not much different). As a result, array/hashes automatically allow you to have arrays of hashes and other nested constructs without hacking so brutally. However, the price PHP pays is that, to this day, I still don't really understand references and there's the annoying difference in the way they're handled between versions 4 and 5. One thing I really do like, however, is the idea of scalar and list return contexts. This is an idea I'd love to see in other languages, as most functions in real life return more than one value anyway, even if maths and hard-core computer science sniffs at that. (Comment on this)
Friday, December 18th, 2009
synergetic	2:48p	Home Alone My parents returned from Poland on Tuesday morning. They left on the morning of Saturday before last, leaving me completely alone for 10 days. This is what I did over that time. On the Saturday, I got a phone call from my granddad's lodgers that their internet didn't work. Figuring I'd get some human contact, I went down to fix it. It turned out the wifi on the laptop had disabled itself somehow. Transient fault? I disabled it and enabled it in the device manager and it worked again. *shrug* The lodgers are very nice people. They're not so much lodgers as also part-time carers, and they make sure granddad is ok and is fed. I like them a lot, and after I fixed the wifi, we chatted and they fed me dinner. They invited me on Sunday to come over again for dinner and a chat, which I did. I also drove down there by myself, after having driven to also do some shopping by myself for the first time. I started off driving shakily, but by the end of the day, I felt happier and more confident. The rest of the time I spent completely on my own. As last time I went completely spare doing this, I tried to keep myself busy. I bought myself a Tai Chi DVD and a Yoga DVD, both for beginners, and tried to do them every day. I tried to code a Perl implementation for a tree node class. I played lots of Imperion, and set up a new forum for my league on my website. I shopped on-line for clothes that I needed, mainly on ebay, and as usual only about half actually fit or were suitable, but at least all were cheap. I bought some anime and watched it, mainly Ghost in the Shell SAC Solid State Society, which turned out to be really good, and the yuri anime Simoun, which I'm still in the process of watching. I spent some time on YouTube (which really does have everything), listening to anime music tracks. I fed the cats. Mainly I read a lot of Wheel of Time. Unfortunately, none of that stopped me going spare again, but at least it gave me something to do while I was. I think that, no matter what's happening inside my head, having my parents around acts like a distraction. If things in my head start to go very badly wrong, I can always go downstairs and watch TV with my father or have a row with my mother by placing myself in her vicinity and waiting for her to open her mouth and criticise me/something, both of which have a certain therapeutic quality. Even if I stay in my room, they'll come bug me. With them gone and no one else around, there wasn't anything to act as a diversion while my brain slowly imploded, like a gas cloud undergoing unstable gravitational collapse. Eventually though, my brain started to stabilise itself and take the strain on it's own. It'll be some time before I'm fully comfortable being on my own, but I was clearly getting there before my parents came back. In the end, being alone proved to be very therapeutic. It also made me realise that, while my parents can act like a distraction in bad times, they're also an amazing distraction when things are going well too. One of the things that helped me take the strain was that I found someone online to chat to. I haven't felt what it's like to have someone who actually understands what I'm going through in a while, and I find it strange that I did so in a complete stranger I met on the internet. Still, such is life, and it's so nice not having to explain every little thing and not having to worry that what I say. Or maybe I should say worrying about them significantly less than I've found myself with other people. (Comment on this)