June Joy : Deciding to throw Priceless!

When one of my dearest friends found out I was planning to move from the Boston Area to the Bay Area, he put me in touch with the planners behind Priceless to give me some extra social safety net and ways to plug in.

Priceless is an anticapitalist campout with about 1150 attendees on the Feather River in Northern California. It’s historically happened July 4th weekend, and has been running for.. 18 years? There was one year it got cancelled due to fires, and a Half Price during Covid, and some other anomalies. It has 3-4 stages with different sorts of music (here’s the sampler set that got me hooked), lots of art, and was (until this year) entirely volunteer run. Our food vendor (paid for in advance) is the only thing that involves money on site for the festival. It’s wonderful. And until this year, it had sold out every year, within a very short period of time.

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Content warning: suicide

I met a woman once, who was constantly in and out of prison and jail. She was smart, and kind, but also knew that she didn’t know how to exist in the world the way society wanted her to. She didn’t like being in prison or jail, but she knew that was where she would keep ending up. She had brought suit in Indiana to ask to be allowed to die. She was a drain on the system, she wasn’t happy, and there was no way out that she could see. The judge didn’t allow her to die with dignity.

I’m a big fan of Death With Dignity. I think there are all sorts of times that it makes sense for a person to opt out of living intentionally. I don’t think deep depression is one of those times, but there are other circumstances. We all die eventually, and I sure would like to be of sound mind and body when I decide when my time will be.

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May Joy : Pedal Bike!

I sold my last car in 2008. While I’ve had motorcycles since then, it’s been important to me to be car free. Reed and I are deeply aligned on that, and have structured the entirety of our lives around this.

I got into bicycles in 2016 when Reed, Tilde, and Rubin built me up a city bike. This was before Reed and I had met, mind you. I loved that bike. I didn’t understand why I’d ever want anything more than 7 speeds. Now bikes are by far my preferred mode of transit, including biking the 50 miles into the office some mornings when I’m going in.

A spreadsheet of bicycles with columns for years starting in 2016 and rows for each bicycle I've owned. Each bike also gets a rating and a status.

I love bicycles. And my life is built around that love at this point. So we were reasonably anxious about how Locke would feel about bicycles. He was in an infant car seat in the front of our Load 75 before his due date. We also had both the Yepp Mini for the front of the bike (way more fun) and the Yepp Maxi for the back of the bike (when he got too big for the Mini and for when we have a full cargo load in the Load 75). We have to ride to preschool even when it’s raining or the traffic is bad. There are lots of opportunities for him to decide that bikes aren’t for him. And we have friends who love bikes whose kiddos just never really got into it.

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Riding my own coat tails

Pregnancy was hard on me for gender and pregnancy reasons. Then Locke came 2 months early, and then Reed suffered from something like Postpartum Depression for 18 months. Life was really hard for a long time. But I did the hard therapy work and thought I was past all of it. Locke was consistently sleeping through the night and so was I. But I wasn’t coming out of the brain fog. I worried it was because of substance love affairs I’ve had in the past. Every doctor I talked to told me that wouldn’t have lasting, increasing effects. Was it because I had long covid? The timeline of symptoms starting didn’t match up. But work and home were both being impacted to significant degrees (once the subject was finally broached), and things seemed to be getting worse.

It took a long time for any of this to even come up. I’ve been performing at a high enough level in nearly all parts of my life that most people don’t monitor what I’m doing, and if I do mess up they usually think I have deep thinking behind it at most, and that it’s a small glitch if it is a mistake. But my new manager at work was paying enough attention to notice, and when I brought it up with Reed he was eventually (after being super supportive) like “just so you have all the data.. it’s not just at work.” He had been concerned about early onset dementia, I was being so forgetful and unobservant!

During all that time, I was mostly masking by having good practices in place that were documented and that I could follow even in my reduced state. I have excellent people in my life who were willing and able to support me even through a hard time because I had invested in our relationships when I did have capacity. And so while it took awhile for all this to come to light, and months to diagnose what was happening, I was able to maintain good practices in the meantime. I’ve been riding Past Willow’s coat tails to recover enough for Future Willow to be well again. Thanks, Past Willow!

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Time is the only thing we don’t get more of

I’m obsessed with time. I think it’s the only thing we don’t get more of, our most precious resource. It’s the currency of caring. I live my life by my calendar to the point friends have had interventions with me. I had gcal pins made both to celebrate this love and also to subtly flag for polyamory. One of my favorite books is Latitude, about the race between astronomers and horologists to help people sail the sea. So at some point, I realized I wanted to get a tattoo about time.

This is part of a series on my Santa Perpetua tattoos. You can read the rest in the tattoo category on this blog.

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April Joy : Waffles and dress up

April has been a really nice month. I went and got two tattoos finished (more on that soon) and visited with friends while there. Locke has been thriving. We’ve gotten some clarity on what’s happening with my brain (also more on that later).

But my April Joy was quite a lot closer to home. A few weeks ago I decided I wanted to do something ad hoc and silly for my birthday party. I wrote a few sentences, made a calendar invite, and fired off an email to a bunch of folks.

My birthday is in April, and I’d like to invite y’all over for kids, chaos, and waffles in the morning. Please 1/ wear something ridiculous that you’ve been looking for an excuse to wear but haven’t found an opportunity to do so, 2/ bring your kiddo(s), 3/ bring a waffle iron and/or toppings and/or something sparkly to share. Maybe we’ll play some board games.

Estee even flew in from Portland! Something like 30 mostly-neighbors but some further away folks showed up and it was exactly what it said on the tin. With so many adults around, the kids were able to run around lightly supervised and got into all sorts of fun times. I loved two sets of friends whose kiddos are within weeks of each other catching up while the younguns played with magnets on the fridge. Reed even set up his retro video game systems so kids could play old games.

Forced perspective of a neighborhood kiddo playing Super Mario Brothers on an old CRT TV while three little kids and one medium kid watch on. North the white cat enters the room with an upright happy tail.

I made something like 4 bowls of waffle batter, plus Reed’s mom made gluten free batches, and one neighbor showed up with this amazing mix already in a bowl with impeccable timing! Something like 7 neighbors brought waffle irons to help out; one brought a big French Press to speed up our coffee making, and we made a mess of toppings on the dining room table. And I got to just hang out in the kitchen making waffles while other people socialized and got to know each other! I learned we can have two high-energy things on the kitchen circuit at a time, so we had a precarious workflow of mixer, microwave, and irons going at all times.

And so many fabulous outfits! Even some of the kids dressed up. Sad I forgot to offer people name tags, but so stoked that people will know each other while walking around outside just a little bit more, and that the kids know to look out for each other. And one neighbor saw that we were not quite complete on our LEGO D&D minifigs and brought us the ones we were missing. How fabulous is it to be in community?! So fabulous.

Approaches to Conflict

We’re already seeing people being disappeared. I think we’ll see more of that, and people fighting back, and a possible escalation of violence between civilian factions, and between civilians and the government. I think things will get kinetic soon. I think it’s important to be deliberate in how we approach the incoming conflict, to not be swept up in it. So I’ve been having conversations with friends and neighbors about what this might look like, and how we want to approach things. This blog post is inspired by those conversations, but I’m not going to name everyone here because that would be bad opsec. These are friends with direct experience with conflict, and/or are deeply researched about it.

So first, to set the tone, there are already groups saying we’re lined up for a genocide against trans folks in the US. People who know how these things go say we’re headed there. We need to be aware of this and fight it, not “wait it out.” It will only get better if we make it better. So this is a post not about theoreticals, this is a post about how I’m approaching something that seems certain at this point. Friends say we’ll probably look like Columbia, and suggest Lederach as a person to read, although I haven’t yet.

I’m balancing two views here, both from people I have direct contact with, and both of which are born of deep experience. One is about how some communities decide to opt out of conflict despite it happening all around them, and the other is about being willing to be in conflict with bullies scaring the bullies away in post-disaster zones. From that, I’ve decided my goal is to not be in conflict, and to be ready to defend myself if that approach doesn’t work. And I know you can’t prepare for peace and war at the same time, but also I’m not setting strategy for a country. The Quakers would disagree with this approach, and point out that nonviolence does not mean passivity, and that putting violence on the table tends to optimize for violence and limit approaches to responding to violence. Regardless of how you choose to engage, hold close to the fact that violence isn’t the norm, and we should work to return to a peaceful baseline. Be loud about violence being abnormal and not acceptable. If you go a nonviolent route, make it clear that fighting, if it’s going to happen, happens outside of your space. The people being violent can do it in their own spaces. 

Most of the ways communities have approached opting out of conflict had to do with being connected with their neighbors and always welcoming more people in (if they adhere to the nonviolence). That’s harder after eviction culture and being hyper individualistic — I will forever beat the drum of bringing unknown neighbors baked goods to try to get to know them. Maybe go talk to your local security forces about how they’re thinking about the incoming conflict and what they see their role as — some have already started making statements about never working with ICE. Further afield, having such far-flung communities means having early warning systems for where the violence WILL start, so stay in touch with those loved ones who live in other places and talk about what the local happenings are. 

When Marshall, author of Opting Out of War, came to talk to a small group of us about his research, he told us about the differences between Sarajevo and Tolisa in Bosnia, and how Sarajevo buttoned down in neighborhoods and fell into local violence, and Tolisa united and welcomed others and avoided much of the violence. An impromptu peace demonstration in Sarajevo was fired upon, killing some protestors, and the movement fell apart and so did the city. Marshall focused on holding a broad circle, anticipation, communication, and relationships with security forces to help stave off conflict. In his book, he also talks about throwing a good party as part of the trends in communities that opt out of conflict. 

In that conversation, we also talked about how we need to only persuade a few percentage points of the population to oust Trump. But that means talking to people who might not be aligned with you politically, and what that might look like. I’d recommend the Better Conflict Bulletin for thinking on how to approach those conversations. I’ve started making bets with people online — define thresholds and timelines and check back it. It forces people to acknowledge risks to their world view, a clear story, and a bid for connection. Offering to build bridges can also be seen as traitorous by either end of the spectrum, and that’s problematic to avoiding armed conflict. 

I’ll still be going to the range with neighbors because shooting is meditative and fun, and because I won’t tolerate people bringing violence to my neighborhood. But I will do so while putting 90% more time and effort into nonviolent approaches, and hoping desperately that path is the one I’m allowed to take.

How are y’all thinking about these things?

Additional reading from Marshall:

  • Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works
  • Chenoweth, Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know
  • William Ury, The Third Side
    • He describes 10 roles for people to play in reducing conflict. It’s an interesting way to think about tapping into people’s strengths and finding the gaps in your organization or your work.
  • Gene Sharp, From Dictatorship to Democracy
  • Sharp, 198 Methods of Nonviolent Action
  • Peter Ackerman, Strategic Nonviolent Conflict
    • Sharp and Ackerman’s organization: The Albert Einstein Institution (https://www.aeinstein.org/). Gene Sharp was instrumental in moving the ideas of nonviolence into secular language from religious. Here in 2025, he’s probably more intellectually influential than King or Gandhi.
  • Srdja Popovic, Blueprint for a Revolution
    • Popovic’s organization: CANVAS (Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies) (https://canvasopedia.org/). The publications page has good resources that are also, dare I say it, fun. 
  • Martin Luther King, Jr, Letter From a Birmingham Jail
    • In my opinion, one of the finest strategy documents ever written.

Testosterone

I’m agender, which means I don’t really care a whole lot about gender. But that also means I don’t particularly like getting bucketed with women based on body shape, clothing, voice, or other things related to presentation.

Although my body got back into a shape I was more comfortable with, another thing I really wanted was to have a less femme voice. While some folks tell me I have a nice alto voice, it still sounds too femme in my head to align with my gender identity. Testosterone thickens the vocal cords, so will often drop your voice. I want that! But it ends up testosterone does a BUNCH of stuff. So it’s been a journey. Here’s mine so far.

Disclaimer: hormones have a different effect of different people, and my experience is not to say what I think the standard experience is for men and/or trans folk. I just found it FASCINATING to have such a different experience, and want to explore it here.

Not great

Mood

I have been far more impatient, and prone to anger. So much so, that the first time I went on testosterone in 2022, I had to go back off of it in early 2023 because I simply couldn’t afford the tumult of a second puberty while navigating Locke’s infancy and also my return to work. Going back on testosterone has been steadier the second time — I knew what to anticipate and be self aware about, and I think the injectable actually helped me out here. I’m still less patient than I used to be, but I don’t think this is necessarily always a bad thing — more on that in the “Mixed” section below.

This has given me even more respect and compassion for the testosterone-laden humans in my life who are compassionate, collaborative, and considered. I see what a challenge hormones can make this approach, which I still think of as table stakes.

Hair

My head hair, already thin, began thinning even more. I started growing (very pale, very scraggly) facial hair. I’m not into either of these things, so I went on Finasteride, a drug that limits how testosterone impacts the skin. It’s caused my hair to stop falling out so quickly, and I have no idea if it’s actually stopping facial hair growth. I may need to start shaving instead of just plucking soon, which is not my favorite idea.

Sex drive

My sex drive, already persistently higher than most anyone I’ve ever dated, has gotten egregious. I don’t know how teenage boys get anything at all done. I’m having inappropriate crushes. I am still treating everyone with respect, and am grateful to the decades of managing this already to help manage this new volume.

Mixed bag

How I take up space

Because of both my abusive relationship and also Gunner persuading me to take up less space, the way I inhabit group situations has changed. I’m less certain of myself, less assertive about things I do know. I over compensate by seeing assertive when I’m less certain of things. It’s a mess that I talk with a therapist regularly about. But now I’m feeling more confident in myself again, like what I have to contribute matters, not just uplifting other voices. I don’t know if this is the testosterone itself or the gender confirmation, but either way, it’s generally been good.

However, I lack grace around this and am starting to trample other people more, especially given the miscalibration of when to be assertive and when to be more humble. More work to be done here, for sure.

Amazing

Voice

My main goal of my voice dropping has finally started to happen, about a year back on T and 6 months on an injectable. I went to pick up Locke from preschool the other day and one of our parent friends was there at the same time and asked if I was sick. “NO! My voice is finally dropping!” I was so excited I squeaked. But it’s been SUCH gender euphoria. Hooray. I’ll never be super base-y, but I won’t be so far on the femme side of things. Hopefully I get a bit more here, but even if this is it, it’ll be enough.

Strength

This has been an unexpected boon. If I was deconditioned, I would need to start with a 10 mile bike ride, and then add 10 miles each week. Now I can hop on the bike for 30 miles with hills or 50 without, and add 15-20 a week afterwards. I’m already benching more than I did before I stopped lifting for a year. It’s BANANAS and it feels SO GOOD to be strong. I like being muscley.

Perimenopause

Because I have ovaries, I was going to go through perimenopause and menopause at some point. Technically, I now have because it’s been so long since I’ve menstruated, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t also have to go through associated hormone changes. Because I didn’t want to deal with the discomforts of those hormone changes, I would have had to go on HRT at some point anyway, and I certainly wasn’t going to double down on femme ones.

In short

Hell yeah, I love being on T, I hope it doesn’t get taken away by this administration.

Bonus Joy : Little Free Library!

I love stories. I love that someone distilled “enough” of an idea into a concrete, knowable object that can be indefinitely shared. I love the documentation, the legacy. I love that others will build on that object in their own ways.

I love libraries. I love a collection of knowledge, well sorted and cared for, to share with others for free. I love how meta a card catalog is, I love information science, I love the smell of so many books in one place.

And I love Little Free Libraries. I love a small curation of “here are books we loved and want to pass on to others” in an accessible way smattered through a neighborhood. They make my little robot heart sing.

So for our anniversary in November 2023, Reed got me a LFL kit. I got SO excited! I immediately made a list of books to stock it with and got as many as possible from Marcus Books in Oakland. Would they all fit? They did not, I had to trim down the list. I matched the neutral tone to the house and the accent color to some flowers in our front yard. Jenbot even made a book plate design for it so I could include why I thought each book was worth reading.

And then it mostly sat for over a year. I would make headway on it every once in awhile (thanks in large part to the same stand up group we’ve had going on and off for like 10-15 years), but I’m not particularly handy with physical things and so it sort of became an albatross sitting in my office. Something that could bring me joy but I just couldn’t get over the finish line.

But I’ve been taking a short term leave from work to figure out some brain fog things, and I made it through my backlog of easier tasks. Reed and I suddenly had an entire afternoon off together with Locke in preschool. After starting to wax some bike chains, we turned our attention to the LFL and managed to finish it up! We borrowed a post hole digger from a neighbor and put it in the ground in our front garden. And the local lab/golden mix Mango came by to say hi while we were doing it!

Willow grins broadly in front of the empty little free library. Their purple shirt matches the purple accent on the library. The library has a tilted roof and one shelf, and is placed in the front yard that has a recently greening Japanese Maple and lots of native plans, along with a bench.
Exceedingly proud we finally got it in the ground

Some books have already been picked up! Reed and I have been having a long conversation about my desire to keep the LFL stocked with the same set of books no matter how many times they get picked up — I want to send a consistent message, he wants to provide variety to the neighborhood as it’ll be a lot of the same people walking by regularly. We’ve settled on about half the books being consistent and the other half being ones we’re going through in the house + neighbors leaving books.

Another angle of the library, this time with books on the shelves. You can see the steps going up to the Idlewild yard and some flowers through a gate int eh background.

March Joy : Goats!

Uncle Tilde took us on an adventure to Goatlandia in the North Bay to feed some baby goats and meet some older goats. So cute! So soft! So invested in being high up! And their wagging tails while they drank milk! Oh my goodness.

Reed in a green jacket and pink hat has a goat under one arm while another puts its front legs on Reed's leg to smell his hand. The back legs are on a hay bale that Willow sits on, petting another goat. Locke watches on from the fence.
Image by Uncle Tilde

Goatlandia is a goat and other animal rescue. We met some ducks, an alpaca, and many many goats. We even scared up a wild hare! The tour guide was delightful — invested in animal well being without being preachy about veganism. The baby goats get fed about 5 times a day at their current ages. While many of the kids (lol) will get adopted out, the adult goats we met are there as their forever home.

Image from Reed

It was so nice to just be out in a rural area with animals. The requests were simple and easy to fill with our trusty guide. I felt like I was in my body.

Then we all went for delicious bread at Wildflour. I’ve only been there once before – on the Freestone Bread Run 200k I failed out of a few years ago. It’s worth going out of your way a fair amount for, and we were in the neighborhood! Each thing we got there was amazing.

Tilde wearing a THICCC hat gets chewed on by a baby goat.
Selfie from Uncle Tilde, trusty adventure-inducer and driver

While Tilde’s car charged on the way home, we spent about an hour playing with LEGOs and exploring toys at Fundemonium. Locke fell asleep on the car ride home and we all got some quiet time to recover from an intense and fun day.