Nook of the Transcendent Neko

Author: Bethani

  • My Earrings are up For Sale!

    One of the little perks that our local public library offers is three display cases that patrons can sign up for to sell their crafts, and months back, Lilli signed me up for one. A fact that I was aware of but completely forgot about until a couple of months back when Lilli reminded me and said that if I didn’t want it, I needed to cancel soon.

    I sat on the decision for another day or two before deciding, “no, this is something I need to push myself to do”. So, over the past couple of months I set myself a quota to make a few new pairs a week, and I did it!

    For the month of June my earrings will be available for purchase, and folks can sign up if they want to order one of my earring frames. I don’t expect to make too much off of them, but if I can make just a bit I might consider doing things like this more often~

    …and of course, a full case was much too big for the inventory I had, so I enlisted Lilli to set up her handmade collage bookmarks and hats for sale too! The photo credit is hers too.

  • I Like to Ride my Bicycle

    My exciting news from this past week is that I finally got a new (to me) bicycle! Look at it! It’s so shiny and blue.~

    After almost 20 years without, I reached out to Tim Johnson of Johnson and Sons Bikeworks, an old acquaintance of mine from my time at the college, and he sold me this used but well-maintained bike. The nice thing about it being used is that it already came with some added amenities including fenders, a rack for storage, and a bell!

    It’s great for riding around town, and when my milk crate gets here I’ll have some storage in the back so I can pop into the grocery or hardware store and pick up goods when Lilli has our car. One thing I realized, though, is that even though riding came back to me as if I had never stopped, my stamina these days leaves so much to be desired. With that in mind, I’m setting a goal for myself to ride the bike a little bit every single day the weather permits, which should be easy to do because once I got on I realized how much I’ve missed it, so biking for biking’s sake is something I actually want to do.

    All in all, I’m really excited to get back out there, because I do like to ride my bicycle.

  • Ghosty’s Visit

    It’s hard to believe we’re already to the end of April! This spring seems to be passing by so quickly, and I haven’t been finding time to write for a while, so this is a bit of a catch-up post…

    The biggest and most exciting event this month was that I finally met one of my friends from Second Life in the real world! Ghost flew over to see me and spent the week at my house, which was a nice change of pace and a lot of fun.

    We started our visit with a trip to the Shelburne Tap House, a favourite spot of Lilli’s and mine when we are in the Burlington area, and stopped off at the Vermont Teddy Bear Company on the way home, but kept it more or less short for the first day.

    Ghost, Bethani, and Lilli

    I won’t go into a complete telling of the week we spent together, but in short, we spent the rest of the time hanging out, watching a film, playing some games, going out to eat, taking a trip up to the Middlebury Museum, and just driving around for a bit.

    Ghost also introduced me to Kirby’s Return to Dreamland, which was neat for me since I’ve never played a Kirby title before, and they reintroduced me to a Frogger game I have vague memories of playing as a child. It was a lot of fun even though I kept dying!

    After the week was up the following Saturday, I had to take them back to the airport, but it was great to see them and spend the week together. I’m already looking forward to the next trip!

  • My new Blåhaj, Cedar

    Since I’ve started following the transgender community a bit more, one particular plush shark has popped up repeatedly, and ultimately, I gave in and had to purchase my own!

    Blåhaj has become something of an LGBTQ+ icon, following posts on social media, and IKEA’s same-sex marriage ad campaign.

    In most places, I have seen Blåhaj referred to simply as Blåhaj, but I like to give even my stuffed animals names. I’ve chosen to call mine Cedar because the name symbolises strength and resilience, key attributes of the community for which they’ve come to represent (and of course, their pronouns are they/them).

  • M

    That’s the letter that appeared on my passport when I received it on Thursday. It would be an understatement to say that I was disappointed. Disappointed but not surprised.

    I’ve been reading stories for the past couple of weeks of trans people getting their passports with the wrong gender, even in cases where they were renewing their documentation or updating only their name (having corrected the gender already).

    Still, I hoped that, somehow, it would work out in my favor. Maybe some agent would check up on my information and see that my birth certificate, my driver’s license, and my social security information all list me as female. Maybe I would get lucky, and my passport would arrive in good order, but that wasn’t the case.

    I refuse to sign it. Instead, I will resume waiting and watching as Orr v. Trump works its way through the system. I can only hope that it delivers an injunction against the State Department’s new guidelines and, importantly, that the current Administration, and by extension, the State Department, follow the court’s ruling. If they do, I will take that opportunity to put in for a correction.

    Of course, at the end of the day, nothing has changed. Receiving this document doesn’t make me any less trans; it doesn’t make me any less of a woman, either. What it does do is make my life more difficult. What happens if I try to use a document that doesn’t match my identity or any of my other identification? What sort of undue processing will I need to endure if I try to leave the country, or more worrying, if I try to return?

    More troubling than all of that is what will come next. Especially if the challenges to this Administration’s executive orders aren’t successful, or respected if they are, how will they further erode our rights? Bathroom bans put a stop to hormone therapy, dictating how we dress or wear our hair. When the rights of one group are curtailed, we all suffer.

    The attempted erasure has already started, and there’s no way of knowing where it will all end or who will be next.

  • 15 years together

    Lilli and I had a lovely Valentine’s Day and anniversary celebration this past weekend. It’s wild to think that fifteen years have already passed. It’s been a long journey, not without its challenges, but I couldn’t ask for a better partner to navigate them with me.

    We had a lovely breakfast, followed by a quiet drive up to the Middlebury College Museum of Art, where we got to see some familiar exhibits, as well as take in Rania Matar’s SHE exhibit, whose portraits offer a glance at the stories of young woman throughout Lebanon, France, Egypt, and the U.S. After we headed back down to have a nice dinner out together before heading home.

    Pictured below is the family portrait I illustrated to present to Lilli, as well as a gorgeous bouquet she got and floofed-up for me, my first!~

    Family Portrait
    Bethani’s First Flower Bouquet

  • When things go well

    One of the goals that I set for myself when I relaunched this blog was that, among other things, I would treat it as a digital diary. Well, as it turns out, that’s much easier said than done.

    I still find myself struggling to know how much I should share, how much I am comfortable sharing, and… how much anyone is even going to want to read. Once I’ve run through all of these questions in my head, the result is that I am not writing anything.

    That said, I have been working on writing more offline, at least while I work out what I can and want to share. Once a week now, I sit down with one of my favorite pens and a journal, and I write… No filters, no pressure; just a quick synopsis of the last week and what’s going on inside my head. I’m on week three now. It’s not much, but it’s a start, and It’s been very therapeutic. (quick shout out to my counselor, who told me I should be doing this a couple of years ago).

    One of the things it’s helped me to realize is a particularly self-sabotaging behavior; it isn’t one that happens when I’m feeling down and out, but quite the opposite.

    Today was a very good day, in fact, the past few days have treated me well. I’ve been blessed with a calm sense of serenity. Despite the dubious direction our world seems to be heading in, my immediate world appears to be doing alright. I feel calm, I feel loved, I feel OK, confident, almost like I can take on the world.

    That’s where I found it, in the back of my head, a nagging voice hissing at me, “You know this won’t last, right? You know something bad is going to happen.” …and you know, it’s probably right. Eventually, all good things come to an end. It’s inevitable, but it isn’t today. Sure, it could be tomorrow, but it isn’t today.

    I’ve spent so much of my life waiting for the other shoe to drop; frankly, I’ve grown weary of that. So what if tomorrow sucks? Today doesn’t, and today’s lesson is that I need to enjoy today and not worry about the unknown that is tomorrow.

    It’s just a thought~

  • Leaving Facebook

    It’s no secret that I’ve never been the most active Facebook user. In fact, most of what gets posted to Facebook involving me is due to my partner who is quite active on the platform, but I have been on Facebook for a pretty long time now.

    I remember when I started, it was around the same time I started college. A group of friends there encouraged me to sign up because they were all using it, after all, it was the thing to do. At the time, Facebook was the social media platform for college students; you needed an email address that ended in .edu just to set up an account. Mostly my friends and I just sent stickers to each other, and some of us played the games it offered.

    As time went on my friends list grew. The platform opened up to a broader audience (read: everyone), and eventually business pages became a thing, No longer the quiet little social network of friends, Facebook had grown into a messy behemoth… dominated increasingly by advertisements, misinformation, and all the political noise I was brought up learning that polite people don’t speak about.

    Still, I maintained a bit of a connection with it wishing friends and family happy birthdays and the like. I had even resolved, since coming out as trans, that as part of my broader objective to step out into the world more I would post more…

    Then they changed their policies on hate speech in such a way as to make me feel demonstrably unwelcome:

    [Under Insults deemed to be Hateful Conduct on the platform:]

    Mental characteristics, including, but not limited to, allegations of stupidity, intellectual capacity and mental illness, and unsupported comparisons between PC groups on the basis of inherent intellectual capacity. We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words such as “weird”.

    Not only does this clearly not offer any protection to LGBTQ+ people, this policy specifically goes out of it’s way to carve out an exception; it explicitly allows what would otherwise be deemed hate speech to be directed at us. For example: it is perfectly acceptable for people who disagree with us to call us mentally ill, but if we want to point out that they are similarly ill for their weird obsession with how we live, that would be going too far.

    It’s clear where this all is coming from, and that their CEO is zucking up to the incoming president… so all that’s left to do as far as Facebook is concerned is to walk away.

    If you want to follow me someplace I’ll be on BlueSky instead (though I don’t promise to post much): @bethie-yume.bsky.social

  • 2024 Winter Lights

    For the second year in a row Erin, her mom, and I got to visit the Shelburne Museum for their annual Winter Lights display.

    This gorgeous light display spans across much of the grounds of the Shelburne museum, and goes until 5 January 2025 for anyone in the area interested in checking it out. Make sure you stop by the Weathervane Cafe for delicious cookies and decadent hot chocolate!

  • It’s official

    My name is now legally Bethani! ^^

    That is all.