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#FridayHappyReadingHour

I‘ve had a kind of unproductive work day. Lots of noodling but few results. So I gave up on it and am calling it - the weekend starts now! 😊

Was hoping I might be able to use this for some of the teens I work with but it‘s too “much” for adolescent community mental health. Kate Bornstein is straight up truth.

Okay, so, complicated feelings here because shared-ish personal experience, and also books for/about teenagers often don't hit right for me lately. I think it'd have been pretty important to me 10 years ago, and it feels honest and messy in a way teenagers often are. This is kinda... a theoretical pick. An I-know-it'd-be-a-pick-for-someone-not-quite-Present-Me.

As I kinda feared, this is *very* teenage and I am not at a point in my life where I find that very interesting... I guess we'll see how this goes.

This book is so cute, and such a quick read. It‘s cheerful and inclusive. The illustrations are fun and engaging (and sometimes downright funny). This is such a great book for everyone. I firmly believe everyone knows a they, but might not be a safe person to know about it. This book is definitely a step toward that safety and inclusivity everyone needs.
#StuartGetty #BrookeThyng #HowToTheyThem #nonbinary #genderfluid #inclusive #LGBTQIA+

Kind of an odd book. Boylen isn't that much older than me, but grew up in such a different world, it's hard to make sense of all the pieces of her memoir put together. I found myself questioning, “is this real?“ a lot. But she has a dry, Vonnegut-esque sense of humor, and there's an underlying poignancy that touched me very much. It's interesting as sort of a period piece and heartbreaking as a story about family.

Since nobody really wants to be a trans woman, i.e., nobody wakes up and goes whoa, maybe my life would be better if I transitioned, alienating most of my friends and my family, I wonder what'll happen at work, I'd love to spend all my money on hormones and surgeries, buy a new wardrobe that I don't even understand right now, probably become unlovable and then end my short life in a bloody murder.

In those days, my friends and I listened to everything--classical, traditional Irish, Javanese gamelan, cool jazz, Indian raga, Frank Zappa, Gregorian chants, Rahsaan Roland Kirk. The only thing completely off our radar was disco, which we assumed appealed exclusively to the stupid. Inevitably, it's disco that people now associate with the era of my adolescence.

The internet at that time was this big, exciting place where you could anonymously spill your guts about gender and discomfort and heteronormativity and how weird male privilege felt and lots of other things, except back then she didn't really have language for it so she just went like: everything sucks and I am totally sad.

... she's, like, way the hell downtown, in Chinatown, and she really should go back to work. Opportunity number two for an odyssey of city exploration as a metaphor for self exploration: poof, down the tube. Whatever. She does have this feeling for a moment though of what it would be like not to be tied to Steph, to their apartment, to her job, but then she thinks: that's some straight dude bull-shit, the self-sufficient loner.