too lazy for a post with content

i just wrote an informational page for tanuki talk as a sort of trans-primer. it talks about what it means to be transgender (or transsexual) in a general sense and then gives an overview of my own experience to date. it can be found under "tanuki info" on the left bar, which has become simpler—text links instead of image links.

in other news, life is good, and i love everyone! (except for nicholas cage)

in case you needed it...

some clarification:

1) i'm not yet "going girl" full-time. i'll have to build up to this, which includes some very important steps (in order):

• doing things in public as a girl, with friends. movies, groceries, restaurants, etc.

• doing things in public as a girl, alone. movies, groceries, restaurants, etc.

• talking to HR at my work. at my current job i might have to get transferred if i want to present as female at work. i'm pretty nervous about this, so it might be a while before i do anything about it.

this isn't to say that i don't want to go full-time, it just takes more than a week to get there. ^o^

2) there's more to my life than simply being trans. i'm not sure if i need to say this more for you or more for me. my last couple blog posts (this one included) have been pretty trans-heavy. i don't see it as a new direction for the blog. nor do i see this as a "new" me. rather, it's just an indication of what's been blog-worthy in my life lately.

and for those of you who may be concerned that i'm no longer the same 'ben' you used know, i say this—after i got home from meeting with my therapist yesterday, i did nothing but play WoW, drink beer, and eat pizza. how very unladylike of me! (shame on you for clinging to arbitrary social gender norms!)

i feel the need to salvage this post into something more than just a trans-rant, but i'm drawing a blank right now.

here's a post photo shoot picture of me:

this is the corner where i had the sheets hung up as my backdrop. i don't know what that funny spot to the upper left of my head is—must be a weird lens flare. i consider this my "boi" look. still a bit made up. still wearing girl pants (as so many boys do anyway). this is about the limit to how manly i feel. ever.

america's next top (tranny) model???

i gave myself 3 haircuts yesterday. lucky for you, i documented each haircut in a variety of poses and outfits. thanks to my gorilla pod i was able to handle all the camera work myself, but it probably would have been more fun with a dedicated photographer asking me for "fierce" and reminding me to "smize".

here are my fav pics:

actually, i take it back. i don't really like this photo. but of all the shots taken before straightening/styling my hair, this was the best. something weird is going on with my lips and it looks like i have herpes.

i like this photo oodles better. this was a fun hair style to make. first, i straightened my hair. then i put my hair up in a high ponytail. i divided the tail in half, and spiraled the two around the base of the pony tail and each other, all held in place with another hair tie and bobby pins. i then pulled some strands out of the ponytail and loosened the whole thing a bit. here's a detail shot of the bun:

it creates this really cool "donut fountain" look (i'm not sure how else to describe it). this was an adaptation of juicystar07's braided top knot tutorial (my hair wasn't long enough to braid).

alright! back to my glam shots:

first cut: bangs. my hair is in a pony tail, with some token strands in front of my ears (in case you were confused).

second cut: trying to look like ramona flowers. fails in a few ways:
• not an awesome color (like pink. or blue. or aqua.)
• bangs too low, checks too covered • the long strands in front aren't pronounced enough from the layering behind them
for comparison:

oh, and one more: my eyebrows aren't sculpted enough (i've been too scared of messing up to do much beyond plucking unibrow territory).

continuing with that same haircut:

this is my pain face. i really should stretch more often.

third cut: hacked it all off! this was my best attempt at a unisex haircut that will allow me to be presentable for a job interview without feeling so mannish.

now, let's take one last look at my crazy long hair:

i'll miss you :(

well, that's all for the photo shoot. there were plenty more pictures, but i'd rather not burn out your eyes, so we'll leave it with those.

and finally, here are some photos of my christmas tree:

(context)

(detail)

it turned out to be a lot cheaper and cleaner than a traditional tree, yet it still brought that holiday spirit into our bro-house (a pink double-wide with 5/6 guys and 1/0 girls, depending on how you count me)!

oh. and for the record, i clearly don't have boobs, but it's nice to pretend sometimes.

this is me

^-^ (<-- this is how i feel right now)

i have some rather big news. i'm changing my name! and i'm 100% out!

for those of you who are new here or were directed here by the facebook post 'outting' myself, i'm transgender! born a boy, want to be/feel like a/wish i were a girl. no big deal. i'm changing my name to samantha (sam and sami are agreeable nicknames). i'll respond to 'ben' by force of habit, but i'd prefer sami or sam (or samantha, as occasion dictates).

for those of who find this news alienating and/or disturbing, maybe we shouldn't be friends? i mean, this is who i am, and your bad vibes aren't going to change that or make me want to pretend to be a normal guy who likes testosterone charged conversation.

but don't let me be too harsh! i know that accepting something like this can take time, so i won't hate you regardless if you're cool with this or not.

so, i decided to shave my legs today (since a part of this whole thing is allowing myself to be as much of a girl as i want to be). wow—that's tedious! it took me an hour to do a shoddy job on one leg:

i'm guessing regrowth is easier to shave (being shorter and sticking up more) and takes less time. luckily, it's winter so no one will know that i have one hairy leg and one smooth one!

feel free to leave a comment (i take questions—any and all!)

pre-holiday udpate

i somehow got out of the habit of blogging regularly, so here's a kick-start! (and as you'll notice from the link in the previous sentence, i'm now titling my links just like my pictures)

in my last post on food i left out a very important picture:

this was my pineapple rendition of mumbo jumbo, of banjo-kazooie fame.

ok. back to the whole "i haven't posted in a while" topic. given the month-long dry spell, i have a lovely set of things i can write about. and for your reading pleasure, i will write about all of them. right now. GO!

the first weekend of december, i roadtripped with cool kid sara to southern california to take the jlpt (japanese language proficiency test). the test was a bit harder than i had anticipated. at this point i'm giving it about a 50-50 that i passed (apparently it takes two months to grade a scantron #facepalm).

wait...i thought i was good at japanese? did i not study hard enough? lemme think...i did study, right?

exhibit a

right, right. i dinked around on read the kanji, mainly because it charted my level of awesomeness with characters (see all the colors?!).

exhibit b

well, yeah they're comic books. but they're in japanese! that's studying!

exhibit c

it's listening practice!

ok, so maybe i didn't really study per se. sigh. however! even if i didn't pass, at least some good came out of the whole experience. like the road trip. which gave me new hope that there are in fact good things to say about LA. traffic, of course, is not one of them. but little tokyo is! check out this cool map:

we ate at the deliciously wonderful, though hardly hole-in-the-wall, curry house. (and if you're interested here's the menu.) we didn't have this awesome map at the time, so we mostly hung out in weller court (the upper left block on the map that is cut through diagonally by onizuka street), which also housed kinokuniya, a japanese book store.

all of this was over-shadowed by a later drive down to san diego the following day, when we went to book-off:

for the uninitiated, book-off is an amazing used book store that has a very large selection of $1 books (¥100 in japan), the most important of which are comic books. i bought $40 worth of books (some were from the higher priced sections):

i'm currently reading at a rate of 2 volumes per week, working on gto (see exhibit b). so with any luck, this supply (and the 10 not-pictured volumes i already owned) will last me until it's time for another road trip.

continuing with the good that came out of the jlpt experience, i discovered the wonders of evernote and livestation. just to show you how cool evernote is, here's a screenshot:

i have a note open entitled "studying for the jlpt" with the tags ブログ and 日本語 ("blog" and "japanese"). whenever i think of something i want to blog about but don't have time to write a post immediately, i make a note in evernote. since i've started a trend with the above picture, let's take it a step further (this is random and unrelated to using evernote).

ok, lemme see if i can get this right. this is a screenshot of my blogger window, which contains a screenshot of evernote, in which the open note contains a cropped screenshot of my read the kanji progress chart. pretty cool, huh?

*completely different topic warning*

my home brews turned out ok. mostly. the first ones i opened (about a week and a half after bottling) were rather sweet, tasting more like cider than beer. they were very drinkable, just not very beer-y. it was lacking in maltiness, hop flavor and aroma, and body. the brews that i let condition for a few more weeks had a more subdued sweetness, but were otherwise the same.

the results shouldn't be too surprising though. the west coast pale ale batch is half booster (a packet of fermentable sugars), which essentially waters down (or alcohols down?) the malt and hops of the wort.

the beer, dubbed "ben's breakfast blend", won't need too much work to be a solid beer. replace the booster with another can of hme (hopped malt extract), and the flavors should be more or less balanced.

in 6 of the 20 bottles, i added an extra spoon of sugar (NB: sugar is added during bottling to carbonate and raise the alcohol level of the beer). after 3 weeks of conditioning they tasted the same as the early batch, but quite a bit more alcoholic. unfortunately, i didn't get them all in time:

this is the ceiling of my closet. i kept the brews in my closet to minimize light exposure. the extra sugar brews were more alcoholic and more carbonated. until i discovered glass shards on my floor and this in the ceiling i hadn't appreciated just how much more carbonated they were. 4 bottles exploded about 36 hours ago, leaving my closet full of glass and my clothes soaked in sugary beer. (-_-)

i think there were more things i was going to write about, but i'll leave it there for now.

ciao!

i gets excited when i talk about my foods!

sometimes, i play with my food.

food is a very important part of my life, and yet, i frequently settle for buying/eating garbage. in an ideal world—one where tanuki exercised self-control—i'd eat healthy, and i'd eat delicious.

for example, i could be eating this:

tonjiru (豚汁 - pork, veggies & miso soup)

instead of cooking something awesome (see above), i usually follow this unfortunate pattern:

i live with 5 guys. some of them wash their own dishes. some of them don't. as such, the natural state of our kitchen sink is too-full-to-fit-a-cup-under-the-faucet. i'm gonna go ahead and blame my poor eating habits on circumstance.

no, really! i feel justified because when i was living by myself in japan during the summer of 2009, this happened:

mabo tofu (麻婆豆腐)

frequently.

so. as an incentive to eat better, i want to start including food more often in the blog, in a series i will call tanuki food. it may include recipes, pictures, and sound clips of how much i'm enjoying what i'm eating.

seriously.

the hobby that keeps giving

today i became a level 1 brewmeister. my mr. beer home brewing kit arrived in the mail a few days ago, and after buying a few extra ingredients today, i began brewing my first batch.

pictured above: tools and ingredients, from left to right—home brewing guide, mr. beer home brewing kit box, starter kit instructions, one-step sanitizer, a pot, a booster pack (non-malt sugars used to enhance the body and alcohol content of the beer), can of west coast pale ale hme (hopped malt extract) with yeast packet under the lid, 'simply orange' orange juice, measuring cup, spoon, can opener, plate, walmart bottled water, mr. beer 2-gallon fermenter.

for the most part, i just followed the steps as printed in the instructions. the wort took a little extra time to make, though, because i didn't pour the booster in slowly enough so it all clumped together. it took a lot of stirring and some low heat on the stove to remedy that.

and then, of course, i added 2 1/2 cups of orange juice to the wort. this may prove disastrous OR it may prove the special touch needed to make my first home brew the most awesome beer ever.

in some ways i feel that brewing a new variety of beer is like having a baby. i'm already thinking about some names, but i'll wait until it's ready to drink before i finalize the name. i'll just have to sit and wait in anticipation for a few weeks as my 2 gallons of embryonic beer slowly develop and mature.

be patient, little one. you'll have your chance to shine. you may be stuck in a dark, room temperature cupboard now, but someday you'll bring happiness to the world.

oh, and to you out there reading this, if you would like some of the finished product, let me know! i'll have 20 bottles worth, ready to drink in about 3 weeks or so.

and i am taking name suggestions for my brew. ^o^