DnD online game

So in two weeks I will begin playing in a 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons game online over skype. It will be my first time playing a tabletop roleplaying game. The game will be DMed by Alexandra Erin the author of Tales of Mu and other web serial stories. A couple of months ago she started posted about 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons. At the time I had recently listened to the Penny Arcade/PvP D&D podcasts and was excited to read more about 4E.

About two weeks ago she put out the call for people interested in forming an online gaming group that will play over skype. Tonight I checked her gaming blog, The Grown Up Game Table, and saw she had posted tentative rosters for the two groups she will be running and I'm on the Sunday roster.

I'm putting the final touches on my character and writing up her background, which I'll be posting here to keep safe. This is the perfect way to end a very blah day.

PS I did clean up my room.

I hate my brain

My room is a mess. Now when I say it's a mess I don't mean there are a few things on the floor, I mean I can't see the floor. The only clear space is near the door. My mattress is part way off the boxspring, the fitted sheet barely covering it. I can see that it needs to be cleaned. I want to clean it. I hate for it to be this messed up but I've been distracting myself from feeling depressed with the internet. I just realized I was doing this a few minutes ago. I hate that I do this. When I feel this way I don't feel like doing anything but doing nothing is a good way to spiral down into really bad thoughts so I end up spending hours surfing the nets.

I did laundry earlier so it's not quite as bad as I said but it has been for about a week. Even this post is a way to distract myself. Tomorrow I start my work week which is good because being at work makes me feel better even when I feel this bad.

I'm going to try to focus long enough to clean my room.

Trans in the not so big city

Back when I came out at my last job my boss revealed that I was not the first transperson that had worked there.

I remember blurting out, "Who?" before realizing how rude and privacy invading that might be and quickly followed up with, "That is if you can tell me." Yeah, I might not have wanted to invade their privacy but I still wanted to know. He said her name and I immediate remembered her(since then I have forgotten her name but not what she looks like). She was a delivery driver for a few months until she left for another job that paid better for each delivery. I remember the first few times I saw her something about her appearance set off a faint tingle through my brain. Not that I saw her thought, "She's transgender." It was more a whisper in a noisy room. Easy to ignore if I wanted too and since I really didn't feel the need to make an ass out of myself and straight up ask her I put those thoughts away.

At the time I wasn't even out to myself. I was in deep denial about being transgender myself but reading tons of stuff online anyways.

Today she and what I can only guess were her parents came by the pretzel shop. We were in the middle of a rush so I had no chance to even say hi. I don't even know what I might have said other than, "Hi..uh..remember me?..We both worked at (that deli)?..So how you been?..Yeah that sounds great!..um..So see yeah later." It not like I could just blurt out, "Hey you're transgender right? Guess what me too!" Yeah I see that ending badly.

Why am I even thinking about this? It's cause I feel very alone here in my city. It's a small city with no visible LGBT community. So of course the one person I know of that is trans, who also happens to be close to my age, and I have no way to talk with her. It selfish and maybe a little creepy, I know, to want to be her friend just cause she's trans but there's no one else I know of.

Random update

Yesterday something strange but pleasant happened. One of my employees referred to me as she repeatably during the day. It was strange because she hasn't done it before and I'm not out to her as trans but for some reason yesterday she kept saying she. This felt nice even if she did correct herself about half the time. It was kind like a preview of what's to come.

In other news I have decided to move out of the apartment I share with my sister and her kids in Sept. This will give me a month to get everything in order. I've made the decision but haven't told my sister yet. I haven't even told her about my raise yet. I don't know why I haven't.

I told my parents the other day about how I was now working on a salary. They weren't very excited. They expressed concerns that the company might ask me to work a lot of extra hours. I will have to work a minimum of 45 hours a week but I've already been working those kinds of hours so thats not a problem. I think they might be worried that I'm settling for a 'lesser' job. In other words, they think I should be doing something more important.

At one point in my life I might have agreed with them. Lately I've been asking myself, "Are you happy doing the work you are doing?" and the answer is yes. I am happy here doing the work that I do. I know that in the grand scheme of things running a pretzel shop is not very important. But we serve a purpose in the day to day lives of those that come to the mall and those that work in the mall. Until cheap robot workers can be made to take over mundane jobs, like making pretzels, leaving the human race to gaze intently at their navels all day, someone has to do it. And I don't see why it shouldn't be me.

The Hardest Part Is Saying The First Word

I said a few posts ago that I wasn't going to worry about coming out at work until I was ready but now I'm feeling that I may need to tell my manager and regional manager soon. They made me a salaried employee. To offer something like that to someone who has been with a company for less that a year is a big deal. It's a big deal to me at least. They could easily have just given me a modest raise like I was expecting. I was looking for table scraps and they threw me a steak.

I don't feel it's my duty to tell them but I feel like I don't want to rock the boat too much when I do transition. I wasn't worried about that before cause as much as I liked the job and wanted to keep it and as many times as I've been told I am a good and valuable employee, I thought I could always find another job. Now I feel like a valued employee and don't want to lose this job.

---

My boss asked me what I was going to do with all the money I'm going to be making. I said I didn't know but I do. As he asked me the numbers began dancing in my head sorting themselves into neat piles.

One pile for living expenses.
One pile for savings.
One pile for electrolysis.
One pile for HRT.
One pile for doctor visits.
And one pile for whatever I want.

But I couldn't tell him about the electrolysis or HRT so I just lied like I always do when something like this comes up. I want to stop lying.

ZOMG!!!

I'm a salaried assistant manager! Woot!

I was expecting a raise due to minimum wage increasing to just a little less than what I was already making. My manager has been telling me that I would be getting a raise but at my last job I heard similar promises about getting a raise that took most of a year to bear fruit. So I was a little bit skeptical hearing that I would be getting a raise sometime after the pretzel store opened. I prepared myself for weeks if not months of being told that it would be coming. So I was somewhat surprised when my manager told me our regional manager was thinking about offering me a salaried position. I was completely floored when he called my into the office a few hours latter and told me they were offering me a salaried position that would pay not quite twice what I'm making now. I've heard of being speechless but never really experienced it till today. For several minutes I could not form words.

I think the hole closed up

A few days ago I woke up early to go wash at a near by laundrymat before going into work. I changed my earrings from the mysitic fire topaz studs to my dreamcatcher earings cause I wanted to wear them even if only for a few hours. I had a little trouble getting the left one through the hole. It felt like it went in half way then stopped. I had just taken out the other earring so I knew there was a hole there. After a little gentle prodding I was able to get it through. Latter when I removed the dreamcatcher earring and tried to put in the stud, I again could not find the hole. That time while trying to get the earring through the hole, I bled a few drops due to some less than gentle prodding. Rather than hurt myself more I gave up on that ear and just wore the one in my right. After work I examined my left ear better and noticed a lump in it which I do not have in my right. I decided not to try forcing an earring through my left ear and to let it heal and repierce it latter.

At this time the lump has shrunk quite a bit and is almost gone. The hole seems to have closed up but I am reluctant to try to hard to put in an earing. My right ear is fine and I have had no problems inserting earrings like I was with my left.

Update eight months later: The next day the lump was almost gone and I was able reinsert an earing. I did have apply a little bit of force and it bleed a little but it didn't really hurt and was not that hard since I was just reopening the hole. I followed up by treating that ear as if it had just been pierced, applying the cleaning solution I was given and rotating the earing once a day and not taking it out until it was completely healed, about two or three more months.

On names

At work we have a couple of dry erase boards that we use for keeping track of when the current dough was pulled out and when it expires. Yesterday I noticed that someone had written the names of everyone who works full time on the pretzel side along with the statement, "We the best." I was amused by it but also bothered a little. See whoever wrote the names used my full first name, Gilbert.

I have mostly stopped going by Gilbert using the shorter Gil or Gilly. There are a few of my employees who call me by my full name but it's a rare occorance and it doesn't bother me much. But seeing it written down like that felt wrong. I took a piece of paper towel and wiped off 'bert' leaving just Gil which made me feel better.

Interesting note: Gilly, the nickname my manager gave me and those closest to me at work call me, is a variant of Gilberte, the feminine form of Gilbert.

Fired a guy today

I fired an employee today. I don't know how I feel about it.

On one hand he was a good kid. He was polite, respectful, and obedient. On the other hand he spent a lot of time just standing around even after we explained to him that he needed to stay busy. My manager has been wanting to fire him for about three days. I've been holding him off trying to give the guy a chance. I tried to keep him busy hoping he would pick up on staying busy. Today I put him on rolling and baking pretzels. He did good at rolling them out and twisting them into shape. He was a little slow but that would have changed with practice. But when I stopped telling him what we needed baked he stopped baking. This bothered me but I think what finally tipped the scales was I saw my other employee getting frazzled because he wasn't helping her enough during a rush.

Did I do the right thing? Could I have trained him better? Was I too lenient? These questions tug at my mind. I am not really bothered by them though. I made what I hoped was the best decision for my store and employees.

A Step Towards Moving Out

So today I made a couple of phone calls to find out if I owed anything to the light company or the phone company I plan on using if/when I move out on my own.

I haven't had a bill in my name for around five or six years. See about six or seven years ago I had been living with my sister for about two years when we started to get late notices on some of our bills which at the time were in her name. This happened because neither of us was very good at budgeting money at the time. Over the past few years we've both gotten better about it but at the time we were terrible. We were slowly sinking under the weight of these bills that we could not possible pay so we switch everything over to be under my name, which worked for about a year until our bad money habits started to sink us again. We cut some luxuries and with the help of a friend who loaned us his info to put the light back on we started to learn how to not get into binds like that and for the most part we have kept in the black except for those rare time when one of us was jobless.

In the aftermath of our stumblings I was left with some unpaid bills as was my sister. Today when I called I found out that I was remarkable debt free which clears the way toward me living on my own.

I still haven't told my sister that I'm thinking about it. I had told myself I wouldn't take any steps in that direction until I talked to her, specifically that I wouldn't call about any old bills. So now I'm feeling a bit guilty about those calls I made. I know I shouldn't.

I feel like a door has opened but I'm too scared to walk through it. There is really nothing holding me back. I have a good steady job, a healthy savings account to cover moving expenses, deposits, first month's rent and bills. So long as I was approved for an apartment I could move within the week. But really I couldn't yet.

07-08-09

About half way through my shift today I started to feel really off. I burnt five trays of pretzels during the course of the night because I forgot about them. So what, you say, everyone forgets things sometimes. Which is true but this was excessive for me. Tonight I burnt more pretzels than in the previous week and a half. I just could not focus enough to remember. After the third tray I stopped and asked myself what was going on and that's when I realized I was starting to feel depressed. I still burnt two more trays cause knowing you're depressed doesn't stop you from being depressed.

This is a random depressive episode triggered by nothing. It feels fairly mild. I'm not bawling my eyes out or thinking about how my life is going to fall apart. I'm just feeling tired and everything feels gray, just kind of blah. I feel uninterested in life at the moment. I'm not having any bad thoughts.

And that's all I can care to write about tonight. Good night. Love you all. I'll see y'all on the flip side.

New earings

Today I bought myself some new earrings, which was like the last thing I expected to do today but it felt really good.

Here's a pic of the dreamcatcher earrings I bought:


I also bought these mystic fire topaz studs to wear during work since we aren't allowed to wear dangling earrings:


I bought two other sets of dangling earrings. One set are silver hoops on hooks with red beads hanging from the bottom and the other set has a brown/golden brown streaked stone hanging from a short chain with a golden brown bead in the middle of the chain. I can't find pictures of them and right now I'm failing at taking or uploading pics.

The studs I bought when I realized I wouldn't be able to wear my new earrings at work. Sounds kind of silly to buy a set of earrings just because you can't wear the other earrings you just bought at work but it feels completely justified to me, so there.

I changed from the studs I was wearing to the dreamcatchers at my work and got a few compliments before I headed home. I was a little self-consious at first but quickly shrugged it off.

Buying earrings may not be a very big deal but the way I felt while looking at them and while wearing them is. To be blunt I felt just fine, which is not how I would have felt just a year ago. A year ago I would have been nervous and scared to even be seen looking at earrings, let alone wearing them in public or at work. It's a little step forward but miles from where I started.

On being called ma'am

Recently I've noticed a slight increase in the number of times I'm called ma'am. I've even been called lady twice in the last few days. My friend Gillian would say it's all about energy and I would have to agreed.

I've been feeling more and more comfortable just being me. Letting go of the act I put on to be normal. Of course I'm not really a very good actress so mostly I'm just quiet. At least I used to be. I'm feeling more at ease letting myself act like I want to act instead of how I think I should act.

I've said before many times that I need to come out at work. I think I'm going to stop saying it cause it doesn't matter. The people I work with won't care and I've decided that if the higher ups don't like it they can just fire me and I'll find a new job. This is not to say that I won't come out at some point but I'm not thinking of it as something I have to do but as something I will do when the time is right for me.