Crowded bus season
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It’s September again. Crowded bus season. Halifax is a university city, so the buses and streets are teeming with young adults. Many if not most of the undergrads were only born when I was working on my B.A. at Mount Allison; time moves so incrementally it’s hard to really get a sense of how long it’s been since those days until you have some sort of external reminder like that, or realizing you and your friends from school are rounding the corner on middle age (if they aren’t there already).
Things don’t feel as long ago as they are. As you get older, increments of time become smaller and smaller in relation to how long you’ve lived, but the methods used to capture sound and pictures have improved considerably, especially compared to previous generations. What was 30 years ago when I was a kid was scratchy film, usually in black-and-white. I think we have more to distract us these days as well.
I started HRT at the end of May; just spironolactone at first, but I’m also on estradiol patches now. It doesn’t really feel like that long, but it could just be due to lack of particular noticeable visual side effects, which don’t really emerge for a few months anyway. People say they see a change, but I also chalk that up to weight loss and quitting my soft drink habit (for the most part). When I was first put on hormones this spring, my next appointment and the possibility of adding estrogen into the mix felt so far off, but once I got into the actual routine of a half pill each morning, a half pill each night, I didn’t notice the time passing. I also measure time in various other cycles: a scheduled day off every three weeks, changing the estrogen patch on my ass every Wednesday and Sunday. Maybe that’s a byproduct of living paycheque to paycheque for so long.
It’s been a while since I’ve written a personal post. I think it’s my perfectionism that prevented me from writing for so long; I want to be the kind of writer that makes other people feel like they too have something they want to write about, the way I feel when I’m reading a good book or personal essay. There’s a repetitive quality to a lot of my posts; maybe that’s a manifestation of not doing a whole lot that’s exciting, or it could also be a sign of atrophied social skills. Sometimes I feel like I’m just posting to have new content to share. I need some new stories.
I want to give this site a bit of a makeover, but I’m not actually that adept at website design, at least not beyond really basic HTML or working with the standard templates. I want to make my bio a little more interesting. Maybe it’s time to shell out to have someone do it for me, though there’s a lot of other things that take priority for me financially.
Back when I set this site up, I was trying to sell myself as a writer and photographer, or at least something more interesting than a call centre worker or perpetual temp. Part of this was to raise the possibility of earning some extra money on the side, but I think my real motivation was to make connections with interesting people. I’ve done a lot of that without using the website, but I always feel like my writing shows more of what tends to be hidden away from people I don’t know well.
I think I’m just content to use this page as an exhibition space for now. If I come up with some kind of project or idea to explore, I’ll share what I have whenever it takes shape, but I think I need to mess around for a little while before I get to that point.
