18 Days: Caffein! Weirdness! Productivity!

Yes, it’s my third post in a 24-hour period.  Wow.  Might help to know about the three cups of coffee I’ve consumed today.

So…here’s the scoop:

• Was on the phone with a charming new acquaintance who asked to put me on hold…and it turns out the other caller…was a charged felon making a rare prison call.  Helps to know my friend is a criminal defense attorney.  But weird to know that the caller on the same line as you is calling from jail.  And talking to the same person you are talking to.
• My “Ideal Human Diet” article has been getting lots of clicks.  I followed some of the ping backs and discovered something interesting.  And bizarre.  There is a group of pro- raw milk folks who are set on trashing Louis Pasteur.  Not sure how I feel about that.  I always marveled at the fact that he cured rabies.  They make him out to be an opportunist and a bit of a thief of other people’s ideas…always following the money, making lots of useless vaccines and the like.  And that Pasteurization doesn’t kill all bacteria while it does harm the milk.  Now, I’m all for raw milk.  But it’s caveat emptor here.  I think it’s healthier.  And if you can get it right from the source, and the conditions are very safe and sanitary.  Fantastic.  But getting milk to the masses is a dangerous business.  And we’re not in a world where people have their own pet cow in the back yard.   Additionally, I’ve just been introduced to a new theory: Pleomorphic Microorganisms, where the website claims, “A virus can become a bacterium which can mutate into a yeast or fungus.” Apparently pharmaceutical companies don’t want us to know about this phenomenon because they would stop making the big bucks on tons of illness-specific meds.  Read a bit more about this term here and here.
  

• Just found out that Chastity Bono (the only daughter of Cher and Sonny Bono) is now Chaz Bono (the only son of Cher and Sonny Bono).  Going through a gender transformation.  Yes.  I was in shock.  But I have no right to be.  I don’t know her.  This is a difficult transition for anyone, and I daresay, this is the first celebrity gender change I have ever heard of.   I guess it hit home more because she was an important figure in my life when I was a teenager.  I identified as a lesbian back then.  Now, it’s somewhat more complicated, but I’ve lived a much more hetero lifestyle for about ten years (perhaps I’ll delve in more in a coming post).  But this is beside the point.  She was a media darling, coming out of the closet the way she did.  I looked up to her.  And I support what s/he is doing now.  It’s just a shock.  And I don’t entirely know why.  In theory I understand transgender people, their feeling trapped in their bodies, their wanting to change to their physical gender.  I support them.  I suppose it goes to show how much gender figures in the identity of a person.  I’ve only known one or two people personally (but not closely) to have undergone this experience, and I wasn’t in touch afterward.  I can’t help but feel like the person they were before no longer exists.  It’s easy to say that s/he is the same person as ever, truer now than ever before.  But I still have trouble referring to my former friend as “he” instead of “she” because when we were friends he was a she.  I know that in order to reconcile this I need to become more informed, meet more people in the transgender community, etc.  Part of me wonders about the role of all the technology that makes this possible.  Fifty years ago or even more recently, sure, you could have said, “I’m a man, I’m a man, I’m a man, I just happened to be born in this female body!”  More likely, because the technology wasn’t available, this sentiment might not even been expressed, or a person might not know how to express it.  How would this person have chosen to live their life before hormones and surgery?  Probably just as a lesbian.  Period.  Maybe dressing in a masculine way. Was Chastity Bono never a lesbian at all, rather a heterosexual man trapped in a woman’s body?  Will cutting off breasts, adding a penis, growing a beard make life different?  Well, of course.  I don’t know where I’m going with this.  But there are so many prominent lesbians I wonder about, you know.  If given the chance, would someone like Gertrude Stein, for instance, choose to change her gender?  Or do the times, the technological possibilities, societal norms (as well as subcultures) dictate everything?  Could Stein have been nothing but a lesbian back then, when in 2009 she might have been undergoing surgery?  I don’t know.  Part of me feels like even the thought of the possibility of this is saddening.  Like, the “lesbian” in me is proud because she was a lesbian.  Bono’s life, body, decision, everything, is her/his own.  But what s/he meant to me back then…it changes something.  Like she was never a lesbian at all.  Even though I’m just talking a bunch of BS right now.  And I have no right to pass judgement here.  Oh the perils of celebrity.  I wish Chaz immense luck on his journey.