Good heavens I sleep a lot!
In fact, snoozing proved virtually to be the central aspect of my entire day. I woke up about 9:30 am, went into town for a look about, got more Androcur and did some window shopping, and then came back. I had an afternoon snooze of about 2 hours, got up and went over to the lab and did some work for about an hour, and then came home. Went shopping for some groceries, then got changed for the gym, went there for an hour at 5:00 pm (why is the gym so crowded on a Saturday evening?) and then came home. I was supposed to go back to the lab to set up a short 13C NMR, but instead I just about napped continuously from about 7:00 pm until now.
That was my day. It's been so long since I actually wrote much about what actually happens in my day (which was the original reason for the diary) that I thought I'd just remind myself for future reference what it is I do on the weekends… which is to say, I certainly sleep a lot.
Oh, and suffice to say this is not Star Trek, I did do things like go to the toilet, eat junk food and bore myself with the internet, all the little dull, unfashionable things which I'm sure will be just as common in the future, but which I admit don't generally make for riveting diary reading. Technically that's the reason why diaries are more often about peoples interpretation of what is happening to them on a daily basis, rather than an exact run-down of what they do every single day.

This Thursday (3rd) is the first lecture/installment/? in the DJ workshop which I signed up for. I really do not have any idea what to expect, and so that is kind of bugging me, but I am looking forward to it. I've always had an intense desire to learn, but generally I do much better if the subject interests me. Ever since Jules D (Damn his eyes! *lol*) got me started into electronic music with "Bonkers 2" back in 1998, I've always wanted to know more about how electronic music (call it Techno if you want) was put together. I'm hardly expecting this course to turn me into a DJ Mnemonic (a New Zealand DJ, which Jules also introduced me to), but I hope to be a little more wiser by it's end.
Jules D is also the person who got me into Animee as well, so you can obviously tell that he's been a very bad influence. ;) Sometimes things don't come off that well, my trial with Linux (Caldera) last year convinced me to stay with a Windows based platform, but at least I now know that Linux isn't for me. A trial with "Abiword" (Open-source word processor) was good, but since it didn't support End-Note (a scientific referencing program) I can't use it as much as I would like. But Jules certainly has opened my eyes to a lot of new things, and for that I am grateful, as well as for his kindness and continuing friendship. [Oh and Jules if you are reading this, you're still a geek, but I love you for it.] ;)

This weekend, Red's girlfriend Paul is down in Canberra. I can't help but be jealous. *sigh*
I often wonder whether I'll still be single in 18 months, because that would be about 5 years since I would have been in a stable relationship.

It's amazing what I am unable to take for granted. I am thinking about a conversation with the Honors student E**** on Friday, where I almost said "I just don't see why guys love big breasts?" Thankfully I stopped myself in time. But I don't see what guys see in breasts as an attraction. I was presuming that it is a cultural thing. In Japan for example, schoolgirl's underwear is considered almost an institution for horny guys, so it's a "fetishization" for the clothes instead of a part of the body, but the two are much the same. However, neither of which I really understand from my particular viewpoint. Suffice to say, I like the idea of breasts, but certainly for a radically different way to why guys do. ;) Hence, the whole idea of attraction and desire is something completely unique for me (and rare other people like me), we have to break new ground because we can't adopt the stereotypes which we could never conform to in the first place.
I'm not saying that I (or we) are completely reinventing the concept of what is attractive, but perhaps having already rejected the concept of bipolar gender (that there are only men and women), that this frees up our minds to reject other standard models of how life "must" be lived.

The other thing I have been thinking about is work, and how people bring their own lives into the lab. "No-one lives in a vacuum" is a phrase often throw about to justify any range of things, but it is fairly true. I am no more able to keep my transsexuality out of the lab, then the German post-docs can not bring their young son in, or the Honors student can't not talk about any old thing from her life. "It doesn't matter where you go, you always take your cultural baggage with you." Hmmm… nice quote.
But the point is, that obviously or not, my transsexualism (why do I use the phrase "my transsexualism"? Perhaps I should be saying "my personal interpretation of what it means to live out my feelings of gender dysphoria"?) affects how I do my job, much as in the same way that a person's sex shouldn't be a factor in a job, but subtly people act differently on that basis (often unwittingly). It's a meaningless question to ask how things would be at work and in the department if I had not begun transition, but it's an amusing mental exercise nonetheless.

12:10 am - In other late-breaking news, giant mutant strawberries are in season, and I'm about to finish my first punnet.
(NB : I was sure strawberries came in punnets, but in my dictionary they list "punster", but alas no punnet.)

1:00 pm - Often I have feelings of inadequacy. That my feelings of gender dysphoria were not so strong as to make me "transparent", and therefore I am not really a transsexual. But now I realise, that a transsexual is anyone who wants to change their gender.
Do transsexualism and gender dysphoria necessarily have to go together? For most of the time yes, but not always, that's the point. However I believe I am gender dysphoric, not as badly as some (for example M*****), but enough nonetheless to justify what I have to do.
I suppose I was lucky, as soon as my gender dysphoria began to be apparent, I was smart enough (even as a young kid) to start covering it up. It helped me survive, but now I just have to see enough worth in myself to stop beating myself over the head for it. Now that I think about it, it's interesting. I know I was concealing my inner feeling from a very young age (definitely before I was 7), but they were still able to make their presence felt externally through my sensitivity.