I’m safe and sound in Hong Kong.  I don’t remember how much I’ve mentioned about the fact that I am going to China, but now you know.  Now that I’m 12 time zones from home, you know.  Anyway, I arrived in the city the day before the Olympic torch is supposed to get here and I am a little worried about going out tomorrow because we don’t actually know where it’s going to be.  The city is going to be a security clusterfuck.

I have never seen anything so big and shiny in my life.  I have been to New York, and New York doesn’t scare me, but this is so much larger.  The streets are so winding.  I am generally pretty disoriented after I get off a plane, but after a couple of hours I tend to be able to figure out which direction north is.  Not so in Hong Kong.  The place is a vast expanse of concrete, glass and steel, surrounded by mountains I only saw in the hazy distance.  The night was clear so I was able to watch the lights in the harbor as we came in.

I’ve also never been so far from home before.  It’s not too strange.  I’m glad that my dad and aunt were around to pick me up from the Hong Kong airport because it’s a little…intense.  It’s huge.  And also shiny, which is something that always confuses and distracts me.  The layover in Tokyo was a little better.  I was so pooped from the plane ride (approximately 13 hours from Detroit) that I bought a can of beer and a box of Pocky at the convenience store near my gate, consumed them and passed out.  Kirin Ichiban tastes better in Tokyo.

The flight itself was not bad.  At least not as bad as I thought it’d be.  I could have still used more room, more bathroom breaks, more stretching.  Still, the Vicodin carried me through.  My back is gonna kill in the morning, and Ariel won’t be around to give me a massage.  The food was pretty terrible, so when I arrived here we went to this Chinese greasy spoon that is on the first floor of my aunt and uncle’s building and scarfed down a bowl of dumpling soup, chicken kanji, and a plate of noodles and beef.  It cost us only about 10 USD, and my dad told me that the great commodity in this city is space.  Food is cheap as hell, so long as you aren’t eating at a Western joint, but if you can get some floor space, you’re really golden.

And it’s huge.  On our frenzied taxi ride from the airport here, I couldn’t believe how many huge, tall buildings there were.  My dad pointed out the container terminal, the scope of which I couldn’t believe.  We saw about a half dozen huge red cranes for loading and unloading ships.  “We’ll have at least twenty-five of those,” he said.  Across the harbor, the city sparkled.  Outside my window, everything shines.  How the fuck did I get here?

For some reason I have been waxing reminiscent about late high school and early college.  In some ways it seems peculiar that the things I liked only three years ago are so far removed from my life today, so much so that I might just be a little bit embarrassed to still secretly like them, or maybe like them for the reason that they remind me of a different time.  I won’t say a happier time, but I will say that it was a time that I enjoy while it lasted.  I’m kind of glad it’s gone now, though.

I found a copy of Plans by Death Cab for Cutie online, for example.  There was a time our freshman year that Brendan and I played “Soul Meets Body” in the basement of South Quad.  There was a time when he wanted to be Chris Walla and I wanted to be Ben Gibbard, in the sense that we wanted to be able to make things like that on our own.  I think in a lot of ways we did accomplish that, but the pinnacle of our career was opening for a band at the Blind Pig, while the pinnacle of Death Cab’s career might be being featured on The O.C. Anyway, they probably feel much the same.  I dare say our little local victory might even feel better.

It’s very peculiar to me, having left all of this behind in favor of drone and shoegaze and noise and freak-folk, that I should come back to it, especially now.  What is it about spring that makes me emotionally remember the pasts that I left behind?  It seems to be a trend, and when I get in a reverie-induced funk, it takes a bit to get me out of it.  The present and the future is more exciting than ever for me, but I keep getting caught in these fugal loops.  In fact, I think the present is better than the past ever was, and I know it’s only getting better.

Speaking of which, how do I even begin to start packing to go to China?

Yesterday I got back from a whirlwind trip to Chicago to get my visa to go to China. You’d be shocked at how hard the whole ordeal was, and I keep telling people, I don’t understand why my life needs to continue to be so damn epic all the time. To start with, the Chinese Consulate General changed the rules on me right before I left — namely, that I had to have hotel reservation information or proof of relationship to family members (?) as well. At the time, I had virtually no information about where we are going to stay in China, and I am still a little shady on the whole thing.

Anyway, I had chosen to take the train, considering I wasn’t about to drive to Chicago alone, not in this state, not a mere month after nearly getting killed. I guess it was a good choice, but characteristically, Amtrak was late. To be specific, the train was an hour and a half late getting to Ann Arbor. I’m used to late Amtrak rides, but instead of arriving in Chicago at 11 in the evening, I arrived at 2 in the morning, groggy, confused, and angry. Luckily Mariel was kind enough to come pick me up at the train station, but we finally got to her apartment at 3.

It was there I arrived at the realization that, to get to the Consulate at 9 and drop off my materials so I could pick it up the next morning before catching a noon train back to Ann Arbor, that I would be getting up at 5.30 to shower, dress, walk to the Red Line, stand on the L for a little over an hour, get some food, find a Kinko’s, get my photos done, print out the remaining flight invoices, and find the damn place so I could be one of the first in line. I didn’t get the hotel information in time, by no fault or choice of anybody’s, except maybe the Consulate changing the rules at the last second.

It was a bit of an ordeal to find the Consulate itself. The visa office is housed in an innocuous-looking marble-faced building on East Erie. When you go inside, you need to take an elevator up to the fifth floor. The hallway seems to be in the process of getting its carpet replaced. When you turn a corner, you are faced with a white room with a copy machine, five rows of chairs, some flat-screen TVs, and six windows, which, at 8.30, were not staffed yet. I took a number and sat down — even at 8.30, I was sixth in line. I was glad that I had chosen to get up really early.

The people waiting to be helped were mostly of Chinese descent. There was one couple with young kids who were hybrids. Some people were talking quietly in English, some in Chinese. One of the TVs was playing a morning news program that was busy bashing Barack Obama. The other was playing a DVD of Shaolin kung-fu, filmed with a soft-focus lens and in very brilliant colors. The volume was turned down on both of these. There were two tall men in security uniforms walking around the room, scrutinizing the visitors.

At about 9.10, clerks appeared in four of the six windows and the process began. I can’t blame the clerks for being very gruff — all they do all day is take applications for visas, passport renewals, certified documents, and other such things, and have to listen to a mechanical woman’s voice call the next ticket holder up to their counter. I think I would go nuts. When my number was called, I handed over the relevant information. She went through my papers and didn’t say anything about my lack of hotel booking confirmations.

The clerk informed me curtly that they no longer offer 24 hour turnaround.

“What?” I said.

“We just stopped doing it,” she replied. She gave me a funny look, like maybe I should have heard.

“Oh,” I said. “Okay.”

“Pick up Tuesday,” she said, giving me a pink receipt. “Pay when you pick up.”

And that was it. I walked away with some confusion, looking at the pink receipt. Tuesday? Shit. I was returning to Ann Arbor next day, and either I’d have to come back to Chicago or send someone to get it. Luckily, Mariel volunteered: I had to leave the $130 visa fee with her, as well as money to overnight it back to me. I’m a bit antsy about overnighting information like that, but I guess people do it all the time.

Exhausted, and a little defeated, I took the Red Line back out to Mariel’s apartment. It wasn’t even noon yet. I haven’t worked so hard for so little return in quite some time, but I did manage to pass out for five or six hours as a reward for waking up early just to be stonewalled by bureaucracy.

Naked Riot! Pick up a free copy of the zine I contributed to starting today at Shaman Drum Bookshop, the People’s Food Co-op, the Common Language Bookshop, Ambrosia, and a number of other fine local establishments. In the words of Matt, it’s the phenomenon.

I worked with a decently sized group of others. We’ve been very generously funded by the RC, amongst others. We’ll be launching a web site later this summer; more on that to come.

Now I like food as much as the next guy.  I mean, it keeps us alive, it’s delicious, and it carries great social significance.  The ceremonies we surround food with are generally pretty fun: this morning was Saramin’s annual spring brunch, and she made a fantastic spread of delicious things.  We ate a lot, and talked about things like the nonexistence of time, which is one of my favorites.  One dance department alum told me about a freaky neurological study that involved showing volunteers a series of images, and then isolating one to be shown at the end — it turns out there is a brain activity spike when the isolated image was viewed, but not at the end, rather, when the volunteers saw the image within the series.  (If anyone has any more information on this study, I’d love to see it.)

I digress.  Anyway I was enjoying my dinner of goat cheese and bread and thinking about how much time we spend in our lives considering food.  And consider the following: Peri probably reads as many food blogs as she does news blogs; and a Google search for “philosophy of food” turns up surprisingly many results.  Sink your teeth into this short article to start with.

To be perfectly fair, I think philosophy of food makes a lot of sense, especially now.  A lot of the points that are raised by Iggers in that article are pretty fair — food has become more important to human beings as a subject of thought.  Take the Slow Food movement, for example.  I can get on board with it, too, except for maybe the genetic engineering thing.  We’re spending more and more time thinking about the ethics and aesthetics of what we eat.

I’m not going to lie, I do think a lot about what I’m eating.  I tend to go out of my way for locally grown produce, dairy and meat, for example.  Moreover, in a culture so obsessed with body image (and as an individual particularly obsessed with body image) it’s hard not to think about what you eat on a daily basis, and what it might be doing to your body.

But in addition to ethics, I do think about food aesthetics a lot, too.  Peri and I actually have a vague kind of plan to go to New York City and eat at as many upscale and experimental restaurants as our budgets and itinerary allow.  I’m particularly intrigued by the practitioners of molecular gastronomy: a bunch of people who think very (maybe too) much about food.

Does anybody know anyone who’s done any work specifically on the philosophy of food?  I located this charmingly outdated website for a group of philosophers — aestheticists and ethicists, of course — specifically interested in philosophy of food.  Anything else out there I ought to check out?

My Sunday night ritual is pretty integral to my level of sanity throughout the coming week.  Around 9 or so, I meet up with some people at Arbor Brewing Company, where we have a few pints.  Our friend and co-worker Ayron has the smoking section Sunday nights, and plays us good music and does shots with us.

Then we either disperse and go home or head to the 8 Ball Saloon to play a few games of pool.  It’s really dependent on how drunk and tired I’m feeling.  Last night we decided to move on to the 8 Ball for some pool and a last PBR or two before going home and preparing to face real life again.

Usually at the 8 Ball, your ID gets checked thoroughly at the door.  They sometimes stare at it for some time, bending it a little to see the watermarks or whatever it is that has been built into our driver’s licenses to prove that they’re real.  Sometimes they just stare.  It’s unclear to me how staring at the card longer makes it any clearer that it’s real, but I don’t blame the 8 Ball bouncers for being sticklers about checking people’s IDs.  The penalties for serving underage people are pretty stiff, and it’s definitely a place that is trolled by cops frequently.

I think it goes without saying that when a bouncer came up to me after I’d used the restroom and taken my next shot on the pool table and asked for my ID again, I was surprised.  I was already one beer in — the damage was done.  The bouncer at the door had definitely stared at my driver’s license for an unusually long period of time.

“Is there a reason that you were using the men’s bathroom?”

Huh?  I’ve never been IDed for using the bathroom.

“I um, actually, I’m transgender,” I managed to say.

The bouncer made some kind of awkward noise and wandered away, but I noticed that I was being looked at funny by the big guys by the door.  Not funny in a physically threatening way, but I was definitely uncomfortable.  Like if I made a wrong move I’d be in trouble.

I mean, I know the 8 Ball couldn’t care less about me as a person, but that’s just pretty disrespectful.  I probably won’t be heading out to there to play pool for a little while.  I’m mostly just surprised, and a little bit disoriented.  I’ve been living full-time as male for the past four years or so and I have never been challenged by an employee of the establishment I was in.  What a weird experience.

I hate to write a blog post on the same thing twice in a row, but this whole media firestorm is something I can’t help but shake my skinny fist at furiously. I mentioned in my previous post that even the Advocate’s transgender guest columnist failed to make the distinction between sex and gender. Beatie himself failed to make such a distinction, and while the fella’s not a sociologist or anything, it seems like if you’re about to put yourself out there for public scrutiny while representing a largely misunderstood, misrepresented and oppressed community you would at least know your way around the language. In the Oprah interview, Beatie continues to use male/man interchangeably.

If we can’t overcome these really basic obstacle, how are we going to move forward? Everyone’s saying, “What did he expect, coming out in front of the national news media, getting interviewed by Oprah, than to be turned into something of a sideshow freak?”

We’re all kind of sideshow freaks, after all, guys. Like it or not. It’s only a question of whether or not we want to embrace and deal with our freakiness maturely. I think that the Beaties are trying to do the world a great service by standing up as representatives of a new standard of gender normalcy — one into which the oppressive binary structure just doesn’t factor as much. They’re living, within the confines of a gendered society (and even Oprah has to admit that our society is deeply gendered), with as little regard for what we deem “normally gendered” as humanly possible.

The Beaties, while courageous, aren’t doing the world the greatest service they might be. Using the binary rhetoric that the mainstream media wants to see is mere collusion; though we recognize our oppression, we’re failing to empower ourselves to overcome it. Education is one thing, but as I mentioned to someone before regarding the Oprah interview, a twelve-year-old can work Wikipedia. There are quick and easy ways to educate oneself on the internet. I’m sure Oprah has the internet. (Correct me if I’m wrong here.)

But it isn’t up to Oprah to change the rhetoric surrounding gendered oppression. It’s up to righteous folks like Thomas Beatie to not only let the world know that he exists, but to up the ante and refuse to buy into the words that the mainstream media wants to put into his mouth. Sure it’s going to take longer to explain, but he did have a major interview on Oprah, in addition to further interviews with other news sources. Don’t tell me that we need sound bytes. That’s exactly the problem. The expectations need to change.

I’m tired of putting up with this bullshit. I’m tired of hearing these crass jibes being made at people who are trying to live their lives lovingly and justly. I’m tired of seeing such people refuse to take a stand against the linguistic barriers our society has put into place, and subsequently colluding with gendered oppression. The only way to change the way people think about non-binary gender situations is to change the rhetoric surrounding gender itself, feminism itself. It’s high time someone stood up and said so.

Thomas Beatie is having a kid. Yeah, he identifies as a man, but he was born female. Surprising to me, I always heard that testosterone therapy makes your reproductive bits shrivel and die. Nevertheless, this miracle of modern science and post-modern gender roles is happening, and there are some people who aren’t happy about it. There are also some people who are happy about it, but for what I see to be the wrong reasons.

The Advocate was the (evidently) first media outlet to report the story. The article linked above was written by Beatie. Robert Haaland’s response to Beatie’s story was interesting to me — and seemed to miss the point. Even Haaland interchanges the words “male” and “man.” Haaland is a trans activist — but why is he interchanging the terms for sex and gender? Guys, seriously: I explain this to newbies to the transgender cause every day, but they usually catch on the first time. Sex is biological. Gender is a social construction. You can’t go around interchanging sex and gender identifiers willy-nilly. That’s what the mainstream expects to see. The truth of the matter is much more complex; if we’re not ready to step in and take responsibility for correctly portraying that complexity in the media, then who will?

To me, Beatie is, perhaps unwittingly, a post-gender early adopter. I say this because he’s not letting the gender binary get in his way, even “after” his “transition,” which has included a legal sex change to male. While this sort of thing definitely rings of old-guard transgender practice, and while I’d be more comfortable if my driver’s license said “M” instead of “F,” Beatie’s childbearing desire is as post-gender as it gets.

You see, if childbearing is a job assigned to women as a gender, Beatie, who has been taking on a man’s role in our gendered society is really beautifully synthesizing both Western man and Western woman. I don’t think Beatie is afraid of the implications of this — and the fact that even members of the transgender population have found this repulsive or aberrant is evidence to me of our unwillingness to undo the bindings of gender.

While this obviously wouldn’t be possible without modern medicine, I don’t think that this biological play is unnatural. The way childbirth takes place in industrialized societies in general is a boon of modern medicine, and it saves lives. Birthing children the “natural” way is pretty rough on both the kid and the parents, increasing the potential for death during or after labor for the baby and the birth parent. Playing god is what technology does best. It’s not magic, it’s science. That’s really not the ultimate question here, though.

Congratulations to the Beaties! Even if post-gender is not Thomas’s stated philosophy of gender identity, he sure is living it out. I think that, to the horror of the naysayers, that post-gender is the future. It is the future of feminism and it is the future of society. It’s the only way to gender equality. Right on.

Today, registration for fall term opened up for me. I think I derive an unhealthy level of pleasure from pre-registration, waiting for my registration appointment, and finally registering. It’s like some kind of weird buildup of fierce, passionate academic excitement. For a fall term, it’s even better because the wait is longer until you get to fulfill your dreams of taking those wonderful courses, and the philosophy department offers better courses in the fall anyway.

I am kind of a registration addict. Without it I don’t feel like I would enjoy the end of the semester nearly as much. It’s like an adrenalin shot right before things get bad. I think it’s helpful that my registration happens exceedingly early for an undergraduate, since I technically only need one more credit to graduate (oh rapture of raptures, I may register the first day for winter 2009!), so I get into the fabulous courses I really want to take.

This fall it’s looking like Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein with Ian Proops, Problems of Space and Time with Lawrence Sklar, and Technology and the Humanities with Thylias Moss. There isn’t any reason not to be excited: all of these topics fascinate me in so many ways; and the faculty teaching them, I’m told, are all spectacular. The thing of it is, these courses are still work. And hard work, I’m sure, but work that won’t be wasted, or unpleasant. Nevertheless, the reality of actually taking a course is pretty great and everything, but registering for it is a singular thrill, unmarred by any requirements for completing the course. Is this weird?

Ever since the accident I’ve been curious what would happen to my digital life should I kick the physical bucket. I know most of the online media is over things like mydeathspace.com, but going over the most recent additions, I can’t help but notice most of the people on the list are in my age bracket — 18 to 25 — and the vast majority of them died in car accidents. And it’s frightening, yeah, and the fact that so many people have said to me, if something awful had happened, I wouldn’t have known, not for days, maybe not for weeks.

The hits on MySpace and this blog and Facebook would keep ticking. In fact, once people learn of someone’s death, hits tend to go up; people post memorials on comment sections; sometimes, I’ve read, family and friends try and break the password on the account to turn the profile into a memorial for the deceased. Don’t you think there’s something weird about fussing with the MySpace of the deceased? On the other hand, it is a little reminiscent of folks who have a hard time moving on and keep the room or belongings of the deceased in perfect order, as if waiting for them to return one day.

Yet the idea of our digital ghosts isn’t so much comforting as it is annoying. It seems like another way that the general public can pry into our most intimate moments in this new wired world. On the other hand, isn’t this our shot at some kind of immortality? I don’t think I’d like to be deleted from Facebook post-mortem. I have talked in the past about uploading my consciousness to the internet, so I can live forever in virtual space. In all seriousness, these online vestiges of lives lost are a little like uploading the whisper of a consciousness to the internet. A little like the first step toward digital immortality. I’m working on it, as you can see.