I've been sick this weekend, but I should hopefully be better by Tuesday, when "normal" posting should resume.

In the meantime, enjoy your labor day weekend. I will be here on the couch with Hitchhiker's and a ridiculously easy knitting pattern.


ETA: Lifehacker linked to this article naming 5 signs your resume is passe. DivineCaroline's list:

1. You've forced it to fit on one page.
2. You list an objective.
3. You write "References Available Upon Request" at the bottom.
4. You attach it to your e-mail as a Word Document.
5. You list every job you've ever had in chronological order.

This is especially important for a lot of my friends who graduated college this past summer, and my friends who are college seniors now, who want to beat out other new graduates in their fields of choice. Employers are looking for the person with the best skill set and most relevant experience for the job.

Now that Hitchhiker's is over, I can go rework my own resume.

Week One Roundup

Quick round up of my week and what I've been reading lately:

• Started classes on Monday, which was okay. It's a little frustrating because I wish we could move a little faster with the content, but I know that some people are having a hard time. (Still, I am bored, which is nothing out of the ordinary, but I'd at least hope for a little more intellectual stimulation considering I'm paying to be there. Needless to say, I am not a fan of mainstreaming gifted students.) OK, elitist school rant over.

• I am wearing fabulous outfits to school. I typically have a uniform, because it makes it very easy to look nice even if I don't have the energy for it. Lately, I have been wearing button-downs, slacks, and some combination of suspenders, bow ties, both, or neither. It is Jack Harkness meets Bill Nye the Science Guy.
  

• It is just terrible to look at pictures of shoes and clothes I will never afford. It is more terrible to read about them and then look up the prices later. I am (theoretically) going to Goodwill on a blazer hunt sometime when I have money, which will hopefully be soon, as I am starting New Job in two weeks.
  

• I've been sick lately. Hopefully not with swine flu or dysentery, because it's still several thousand miles to Oregon and my wagon is full of people named after actors who have played the Doctor.

• Also dealing with some mental health issues, nothing serious or life-threatening, but kind of annoying anyway. Might post about it later.

That about wraps it up. How has your week bee?

Early Post: Butch Voices/Butch Intellectuals

I know we're not officially launched until next week, but I saw a post on Jezebel about butch intellectuals that linked to an NPR story about the Butch Voices conference (which I will try to check out next year--I was out of town on another engagement during this year's conference last week), and I had to write about it.

When asked for his reasons behind founding the Butch Voices conference, Joe LeBlanc responded that "there are just so many stereotypes about us that we have to be these silent cool types that don't talk or only are about how we look." Later, he expands on this idea by saying "butch is thought to be this very visual identity, a very flat - you know, the woman that you would see who you believe wants to be a man, you know, very hard, gruff, mechanically inclined, the man of the relationship. ... I mean, there's butches who enjoy cooking, who enjoy sewing. I mean… You know, they wear make-up. I mean, it's not just about, you know, the clothing or the hair styles. It goes deeper than that."

Those quotes resonate deeply with me. In the past, I have struggled with claiming a "butch" identity because I have many traditionally "feminine" inclinations as well. I love studying maths and sciences, and I'm really passionate about cars. I'm a mechanical engineering major who only shaves above the neck. At the same time, I'll read Victorian literature for days . I will happily create scrapbook pages for important events in my life. My laptop is pink. I just finished making my first quilt. I will sleep with men when it suits me (but only if we fuck like gay boys--what does that mean anyway?).*

I must apologize for sharing half my personal history in the above paragraph. I have not, for the last ten years, been able to claim the label of "butch" without having to follow up with a bunch of qualifiers like those above. It is a privilege to be able to say "I am a man" or "I am a woman" and have no one second-guess your identity.

Once, I thought it would be easier to say, "I am a man." I bound my chest. I injected hormones. That stopped a year ago. Today, my voice cracks when I laugh, and I am slowly training myself into a refined contralto. My chest hangs low and heavy from years of binding, but I stand confident for the first time in too long. I make people trip over pronouns.

I am a butch, a gentleman, and a scholar. I am not a stereotype or an ideal. Butch is an entity that has been shifting since its creation, the way cars today aren't still Model Ts, but they are still cars. There are Ford F-150s and there are Lamborghini Gallardos. I prefer to think of myself as somewhere in between, a Porsche 911. Powerful, technically brilliant, and curvy without being cute.

Let's see where this road goes.


* While writing this post, I had a difficult time coming up with examples of my "feminine side" that did not involve how I looked/dressed or what I bought. I feel a follow-up post coming on.