Pull My Reins

 I feel like I should get back into some routines. I hate routines, but I understand they're good for people of a certain age. So blogging might be a thing.

Let me tell you a bit about music. I don't know that I can live without it. I remember when I was in college, and my girlfriend at the time was trying to take her Catholic faith very seriously and gave up music for Lent one year. I ... I should have known that that wasn't going to work out. But alas. She left the church and I still have music.

This week I went to a live show in DC at the 930 club. It appeared to be a full-capacity show, with approximately 1100-1200 people if my group size estimation powers are still good. That's the same capacity as pre-COVID. It was a bit much for my companion, who had to go outside to get some air at one point. The band was IDLES.

In the 90s, when I was growing up, if a band was really openly anti-war, anti-hate, it would have fallen into a weird little sub-genre of acts that were kind of a joke.  "positive punk" or some shit. But now, in this world, a band like IDLES can just blast into a tune with the intro of "this is an anti-fascist song" and it flies. Every single song they played felt like the final song. They played the crowd like another instrument. It was glorious, and it was very much about goodness and love. Fucking amazing band. Life changing show.

What's in a name?

 When I got married in 2007, I decided to hyphenate my last name. My wife planned to do so, so I figured it would be fair and fine for me to do so as well. In Ohio, there is no provision for men to change their names upon marriage, but women are given the freedom to change their names pretty much any way they choose. I had to go through a separate name-change action in civil court, which I completed maybe a year and a half after the wedding.

By that time, I had started my career in federal service. All of my records and credentials included only my original last name, not my hyphenated one. Over the course of years I got my records updated, got new credentials, and in most cases, had to explain why I changed my name in addition to providing the proof of name change from the court.

One thing that has persisted in my federal records is my email address. While my name shows as the hyphenated version, my actual address is still just the original name. This is left over from the mission support guy in NYC who did the change to my Outlook profile--he changed my visible name without changing my email address. He said something at the time like "well, if you decide you want to change it back, this is easier." There was a sense that maybe my wife had put me up to it, or that maybe I'd reassert my masculinity and go back to my proper name. 

These kinds of biases have not gone away. Men, however, have always kind of looked at me quizzically when I explain it. My neighbor, who is a pretty liberal dude but about 18 years my senior still calls me by my original last name, even though he's only known me with the hyphen. He even said something like, "yeah, but that's not your real last name." I usually just shrug off the intimations, as most of the men making these comments are either older or from a more masculine cultural background. But it has bothered me.

It occurred to me that this is a form of discrimination. Me choosing to  hyphenate my name is a little queer. It's not in line with the regular gender roles of men keeping their names and women maybe hyphenating (with the suggestion that a woman who hyphenates isn't properly subservient to her man anyway). So there's a nuance that I'm not as male as I should be, and therefore, a bit queer. I'm not the poster child for queerness or being discriminated against for who I am and how I've chosen my name. I have not had to deal with any of the shit my gay or trans friends have dealt with, or even the kinds of discrimination that any woman deals with on an average day in America. 

But it is discrimination. Women in my organization who have been married have had their credentials and email addresses updated within days of submitting the request. There shouldn't be any reason mine has been held back.

So I'm pushing to get my stupid email updated in part because I want to normalize this kind of change and name use for men (CIS WHITE AMERICAN-BORN MEN, YES) in my organization and just chip away at that dividing line. Me, 5% queer, doing my part.

UPDATE: My organization does one thing efficiently, and that's update people's names in the IT directory. They then deleted my old profile, so ... I was unable to log into my computer all day. I had to dig around and find the actual PHONE number to call our help desk and talk to a PERSON to get it resolved. But eventually we did and it's all good now.

Got COVID. Nothing else to do but sit around and write

 Well. After a year of being safe and teaching my kids to wear masks and everything, I go out and get my first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine and find out that I actually HAVE COVID.

I got my first shot last week and the usual symptoms started up right away--light headache, body aches, fatigue, etc. Within two days, I had a sore throat that progressed to a severe sore throat. My doctor recommended I go get a COVID test just to be sure and BAM. Got COVID. So did the wife, but neither of the kids, strangely.

Fun part, this was supposed to be Spring Break. We were set to go see my kids' grandparents on Monday, but by then we were all confirmed to be in quarantine. The last time we planned such a visit was in November. En route to that meeting, a deer t-boned our Toyota Prius and totaled it. At least this time, we don't have to worry about picking glass out of our hair. (The deer died, btw. Six shots to the skull thanks to the local deputies).

So here we are. My symptoms have mostly abated. I'm just really tired and run out of energy every 4 hours or so. And I'm cranky--every little thing the kids do, I just want to throw them out the window. I haven't, not yet, anyway. It's just  the worst, longest, stay-at-home weekend ever.

Neighbors and friends have been supportive, though. People volunteering to go to the store for us, dropping off snacks and presents for the kids. It's nice. It would be nicer if we could all just be vaccinated and safe and hang out like normal, but oh well.

How did we get COVID,  you ask? Oh, fun story. So maybe it was because our kids are in school and one of them brought it home. Possible. But it could also be because we broke down about two weeks ago and went to a restaurant with the kids. We wore masks and did our best to distance, but we did dine indoors and there were some people around, so maybe that. Yeah, assholes, I know.

We were probably asymptomatic and the vaccine blew it up. We could have been walking around for weeks, contagious, and not known about it. We could have gone to visit the grandparents and gotten them sick. Maybe it's a good thing that we caught it after all. Ugh. Back to sleep with me. I'm not making sense.