You Don't Live Like I Do

As I mentioned while talking about Levy Pride, I was happy to take part in some of the events outside the "main area" of the Klondyke Club. Going to the Lesbian Cheese Party was great fun, watching the arm wrestling and taking part in the cheese throwing, while still being back at the Klondyke for the dog show, which is the best part of this and any other pride.

This weekend is Manchester Village Pride, with lots of activities in the Village itself. There are also two official fringe events for the Pride - one is the family fun activities at the Great Northern this weekend, and the other is the Scene Film Festival which runs in the week before Pride.

Last Saturday after gym I went to Cultplex in Cheetham Hill to watch a couple of films as part of the Trans Image, Trans Experience (TITE) takeover of Cultplex. First up was "October Crow", written and directed by Jack Haven who I recently saw starring as Maddy in "I Saw The TV Glow". This clearly a labour of love, featuring a lot of Haven's real live friends, and written as a tribute to actor Peter Nolan Smith (Haven's upstairs neighbour). But it didn't really click for me - it was the kind of arty where every shot lingered about 25-50% longer than it needed to, the motivations of the characters weren't particularly clear or interesting, and shooting on iPhone meant that tracking shots going through light and dark areas suffered from the camera over-correcting the brightness in sometimes painful ways.

Fuelled by an excellent kebab, I watched the next film, "Puppygirl". The description of "a semi-delusional trans woman" in a "gonzo documentary" gave me the ick, but I decided to give the TITE and SCENE organisers the benefit of the doubt and I'm glad I did. Basically it's the story of Milo, a trans woman in Chicago, and part of a queer community there. Puppygirl play is really big among transfemmes, and people she's dating assume she's into it, when she's not. Then she gets invited to appear in a porn film as a puppygirl and decides to try and see what the fuss is about. The documentary follows the theme of a voyage of discovery, but is really a slice of life about Milo and her friends (including the film's director).

After that I headed over towards HOME for the free outdoor screening of "Clueless" with cosmolinguist. I thought I'd not seen it before, but within about 30 seconds of it starting I realised I had. So we just sat in the sunshine in deckchairs, drinking beer and enjoying the movie.

We missed the last few minutes of "Clueless" because it clashed with Greg Araki's "I Want Your Sex". This was a generation clash movie, with a famous Millennial artist who seduces her Gen Z intern into kinky sex. And like other Greg Araki films, it descends into nihilistic farce. If you like seeing horrible people doing horrible things and other people get sucked into their orbit and it all ending terribly, this is a fun film. In the video intro beforehand, Araki said it was an attempt to get the sexless Gen Z to fuck, and I don't think it works on that level - the main Gen Z character is clearly horny, and his life is ruined as a result. Still, it has a lot of Olivia Wilde in latex, so I could appreciate it on that aesthetic level. Also I was amused by my Gen Z friends' reaction to the film; they hated the fact that a powerful woman did terrible things and didn't really get any come-uppance. Perhaps that's the reaction Araki was trying to provoke?

Last weekend was Levenshulme Pride, and it was great fun. I won't do a blow-by-blow account of what happened. But it was good for me as a feeling of community and friendship at various levels, including:

• Two of my partners were out with me. Sadly P was laid up with a cold. But it's rare that V makes it out to stuff like this and it was lovely to have them there
• Close friend A came along with us on Saturday after trans gym (having showered and changed at our house), joined in the Levenshulme Pride Parade, hung out with us at the Klondyke afterwards, met some of our friends, and seemed to have a good time. We chat online a lot but don't spent a lot of time with him outside of trans gym, and it was great to share a bit of our lives with him.
• P's partner J came along on Sunday and joined us at the Lesbian Cheese Party in Cringle Park to watch arm wrestling and throw a Babybel at a Grownupbel; they mooched up to the Klondyke with us afterwards to watch the dog show. Again, it's rare that we hang out with them in this combination of people and they're really lovely.
• The Lesbian Cheese Party was co-ordinated by one of the Queer Club founders and it was great to chat with him a bit there
• Some of my former coworkers from my terrible last tech job came along to the dog show and I got to hang out with them and a friend of theirs, catch up and admire good dogs
• We were marching in the Levenshulme Pride Parade with Queer Club, which I now help organise. It was great having friends from that on the march, and great to hang out socially with two fellow Qumittee members; we went to their wedding but obviously they were kind of busy at the time, so this was lovely
• One of aforementioned good dogs was Xena who has holidayed at the Wonder House before, and we got to chat to her human as well - we met them through Queer Club
• Generally there were a bunch of queers I'm on friendly "wave and say hi" terms with around
• Even the ones who are associated with Bad Shit didn't try to start anything

I feel a lonely and disconnected a lot of the time, so a weekend with so many connections and conversations was really lovely. I'd rather try and remember that feeling than the chronological details. Also, going to the Lesbian Cheese Party was great; in previous years we've just hung around the Klondyke by default, but I'm going to keep an eye out for more things like that in future.

It was a busy day but a good one. P decided to go to Trans Gym this morning with me and cosmolinguist so we set off slightly earlier than usual to pick her up on the way. The area around the gym is a bit of a building site at the moment and after class our friend A was not sure how to reach his bus home, so I offered him a lift. A bit out of our way but a good chance to catch up after EMF.

I dropped P home, then picked up my meds from the pharmacy, and came home for breakfast and shower. Around 2pm, all of us (me, V and E) headed round to P's to see her and her partner J, their garden (which has had a lot of V input on plants), and a friend who was visiting them. After lunch, me and P went to the charity shop to drop off donations from both our houses, and to pick up some compost.

We got two 40L bags of compost from Home Bargains, and P picked them both up off the till and carried them to the car, because she can and she likes lifting things. There was a lady behind us in the queue who gave me a real death stare, presumably for my lack of chivalry in "letting" my girlfriend carry the heavy stuff, which pretty much everybody found funny when I told them.

After more chatting and socialising, the people with energy-limiting conditions were getting tired and we headed home. But I picked up a bag of garden waste to take to the tip, and combined it with a bunch of stuff from our house, so me and E went and got rid of all that stuff. Since we got back from the tip the evening has been pretty quiet - the hearty lunch meant that we weren't bothered about a big dinner.

Hi all, long time no blog. I pointed a few people from EMF Camp to my Dreamwidth so I guess I'd better post something.

I've been away on Adventures, and Stuff has been happening. Just over a week ago (really?) was Goths On A Field, where I saw many good bands, had a nice time camping in a heatwave, and experimented with mylar sheeting. I've just got back from a week at Electromagnetic Field 2026, which was both great and frustrating in different ways. I hope to say more about both those things.

Back at the house, we're in the middle of having solar panels and a storage battery fitted. I've found myself trapped in my office today because the loft hatch is immediately outside, and people have been working on ladders. Still, it's very exciting.

But now my attention needs to turn to the things that are happening in the immediate future, so I'm making a brief list here to try and avoid missing anything.

Queer Stuff

• Levy Queer Club next week - do Fediverse socials, discuss what needs to be done ahead of Manchester Village Pride
• Buy Manchester Village Pride tickets
• Plans for Stockport Pride, Manchester Trans Pride

House Stuff

• Figure out how to use new solar + battery setup
• Switch electric tariff to one that makes sense with new setup
• Remortgage by mid-August

Health Stuff

• ~~Reorder meds~~
• Catch up on group therapy notes from last week (missed due to EMF) and practice
• Look at private ADHD diagnosis

Other

• Car MOT
• Car aircon recharge
• Check why Codeberg payments haven't gone through

The last Bank Holiday Monday was fun. cosmolinguist's Canadian friend Bill was in the UK, and we haven't seen him for over a decade. Incompatibilities with Bill's idiosyncratic approach to communication technologies meant that I had to be the go-between and secretary, and for a while we weren't sure whether he had received any messages from us. But he got back to us on Monday morning and we made plans, meeting him in the city centre at lunchtime.

I did my tour guide bit, showing him the still-bescaffolded Town Hall, Lincoln Square, the John Rylands Library on Deansgate. Apparently he'd been to the latter before, but didn't know it was one of the first places in Manchester to have air filters installed during the Industrial Revolution, to stop soot and sulphur in the air from contaminating the library books. We doubled back along Peter Street and the former Free Trade Hall, and ended up at Society, down by the Bridgewater Hall, where Bill and I enjoyed pizza and E had veggie quesadillas. After that we took in the lovely tiled Peveril of the Peak, the punky former-toilet Temple of Convenience where we chatted international politics with a lefty Polish bartender, and headed up to the Village to the Molly House.

Talking to Bill is a bit like white water rafting - he says what's on his mind at any given time, and he's massively knowledgeable and fearsomely intelligent, so the conversation flows fast from topic to topic and really all you can do is cling on for dear life and hope to occasionally nudge things.

It was great fun. So much so that we managed to do it again the following Friday - this time we hit the Northern Quarter, starting in Bar Fringe talking about creativity and art. Later in Terrace we got talking to some students who bummed cigarettes off Bill, which ended up in some bizarrely deep and meaningful conversations. Eventually E and I staggered off for the last train and Bill walked with us, then went to check out the Piccadilly Tap.

He'll be back next year. I'm looking forward to it already.

Last weekend was rather busy. After work on Friday, me and cosmolinguist cycled to Station South for a pint. It's the first time I've been on a bike since my hernia operation six weeks ago, but it didn't seem to cause any problems. Of course, I took it gently. And it was lovely to sit outside in the sun and drink and chat.

On Saturday morning, we met up with some Internet friends to walk around Sale Water Park with some doggos. It was nice being sociable, and the slow sniffy labrador meant we didn't go very fast. We chatted to a lot of people, and ended up having a nice pub lunch, again sat outdoors in the shade. We headed home briefly, to recharge my phone (and myself), before heading into the city centre for a friend's birthday, drinking in the sunshine at North Beer. It was fun to meet some new people, and have some good conversations about Manchester's history, culture and attitude. We ended up in the beer garden at The Salisbury, my old haunt from the 90s which is now much closer to its old rock pub self than its weird mid-noughties wine bar incarnation, but it was too noisy and smoke-filled so me and E headed home after a token pint of Old Perculier.

On Sunday, we went to visit Bud Garden Centre for their birthday party! We pottered round and looked at plants, but this was the point where my abdomen had had enough and started twingeing, so I went to sit in the car while E and V did the shopping, and took part in the raffle and other fun things. When we got home I had a nap, and in the evening we watched an MR James livecast.

My standard metric for a good weekend is "does last week feel like a long time ago", and with all these things it definitely does! I'm glad that I could do the exercise I did, and that I rested as soon as my tummy started hurting so it didn't get any worse. And it was great to get so much sunshine.

We live on a street where about a quarter of the houses have Muslim families. This morning I watched our neighbours opposite, who moved in fairly recently and we don't know well, pose for photos outside their house all dressed up in smart clothes. Later on our next door neighbour, who we know well enough to have sent an Eid card, was outside with his toddler and wife, chatting with another neighbour, who is white and not religious AFAIK.

The weather is nice enough that I had the windows open - not enough to overhear any conversations but enough to know that there is chatter and happiness around me. It's nice.

ETA: Our next door neighbour just brought round some food and and a really cute little teapot for us!

Today has been a bit of a weird day. Me and cosmolinguist got up at 6am, were out of the house for 6:45am and at the hospital by 7am. The Elective Surgery Unit wasn't "properly" open, so we got let into the reception area and just wandered around until we found some people who told us where to go sit down. By 8am I was on the ward, I'd been briefed on what was happening, and E knew when to come back and collect me. He went and caught the bus home and had a nap, having done the most important job of getting me to the hospital on time. I was visited by the anaesthetist and the surgeon, both of whom were confident in the procedure.

The apprehension of mortality which had ruined my Friday Yoga had pretty much dissolved by this point and I was determined to just get through it. I was second in the queue of six patients, so I got changed straight away into incredibly snug paper pants, and two surgical gowns - one worn with the flap at the back like usual, and a second opening at the front like a dressing gown over the top to protect my modesty as I walked to the operating theatre, literally at the end of the ward. With 6 patients in a ward designed for 24, CO2 levels were low so I didn't have to mask. I dozed for about an hour and a half, using my rucksack and hoodie as a makeshift pillow. By this point, around 9:30am, I was feeling OK, just exhausted. I think I was too tired to be worried.

I had to sit around outside the theatre for a bit, and get fitted with a cannula by an anaesthetist who was rather brusque. Fortunately such things bother me less than others, and he might have been kinder if I'd made more of a fuss beforehand. The nurse weighed me and said I don't look as heavy as I am, and I bit my tongue rather than go on a rant about the BMI bullshit which has denied me this surgery for years. I got asked what I did so I started talking about apprenticeships and how they're useful for people for whom academic paths don't work out - and how many people with dyslexia or other support needs we find once they've been pushed out of traditional schools, because testing for functional skills is mandatory in an apprenticeship. Turns out I'm still pretty passionate about that, even though it's far removed from what my job actually entails.

I went into the theatre, got settled on the table, started breathing in gas while they injected the general anaesthetic... and woke up in recovery, at about 11:30. ( Vague medical details below )

One of the ward nurses brought me tea and toast which was gratefully received and scoffed. I dozed for a bit, but the guy in the bed next to me, who'd had his inguinal hernia surgery (a complication from a hip replacement) before me, was waiting for his wife and bored and chatty. So I talked with him quite a lot, he's in his late 70s / early 80s, retired from doing computer stuff back in the 1970s. We talked about the changing face of technology over the decades, such as how a modern $1 embedded system can emulate an original Mac Classic. He had military tech experience so I talked about some of my programming jobs in the 90s on classified projects, and also about ISO26262 and MISRA, both standards in functional safety which came about from real-world errors such as the fighter plane which flips upside down if it crosses the equator on autopilot. We talked about dogs and horses (he keeps some where he lives in Altrincham). Lovely conversation but utterly knackering when I was a couple of hours behind him on the recovery from anaesthetic.

Just after his wife arrived to collect him, E arrived to collect me. He helped me get changed out of my tiny paper pants and gown, into the clothes I'd arrived in. By that time I'd had my last set of obs and the water had worked its way through my system so I had a successful wee. So the nurse brought over discharge paperwork, went through some of the details with me: no shower or bath today, no baths for a couple of weeks, no driving for at least 48 hours and until I can safely do an emergency stop without pain; no lifting more than 5-8kg for 4-6 weeks. Then we headed out and grabbed a taxi, getting home around 3:30pm, about 9 hours out of the house.

I've spent the afternoon chilling out on the sofa, drinking 2 litres of apple squash and just starting to feel rehydrated. I was too tired to play games or watch much of anything, until I had a little nap while E was out walking the neighbour's dog. E let me sit at his end of the sofa so I could stretch my legs out, and V lent me their weighted capybara plushy which was comforting. This evening we watched Team GB vs USA in the World Baseball Classic, which was an interesting game for the first 4 innings until the Americans woke up and walked all over the Brits. I'm still feeling tired and woozy - clearly too tired to write a concise DW entry, so well done if you've persevered this far. I'm glad the surgery is over; I hope the recovery is mild because I've got a lot of work to get done by the end of next week! I'm not looking forward to going weeks without any gym though...

Today I missed going to the gym because I had a morning hospital appointment. Next Sunday, I'm having surgery on my umbilical hernia, so today I was having bloods taken, being swabbed for MRSA, and having a pre-operative interview to discuss the procedure. This has taken literal years since I was diagnosed with the hernia in 2022 and dismissed for being fat in 2023 so I'm happy it's finally going ahead.

Other than that we didn't have many plans for the day. I finished playing through Control again, in time for the sequel to come out soon. Then I went upstairs and spent a couple of hours blitzing ADHD paperwork. I got so caught up in this that I forgot to come down for dinner and was exhausted by the time I did. We tuned into a Nunkie MR James stream, but I promptly fell asleep!

After that I made myself a snack and watched this week's Starfleet Academy, which was lovely. It has made me simultaneously curious about and terrified of reading / seeing Our Town.

Also, I noticed that iPlayer has the Derek Jacobi teleplay of Breaking the Code, the biographical play about Alan Turing. It's a much better portrayal of Turing (at least according to the biographies I've read) than the terrible "The Imitation Game". Me and cosmolinguist saw it on stage last October, which was a competent enough production.

I've just applied to Companies House to have my Limited Company, of which I am sole director, struck off and dissolved. I founded it years ago as a potential holding organisation for providing IT services to political organisations. But it never really worked out like that - I spent many years providing those services such as mailing lists, chatrooms, wikis, CRM systems, but never got on the "approved suppliers" list. Then 2019 happened and... yeah, I stopped doing that. Part of people fucking me over in politics was making false allegations about me violating data protection laws, and that shit could have damaged my real job, so it was another reason to back away.

I'm feeling bittersweet about it all, but I still have my head held high. I did a better job than many of the people who actually got paid for doing this sort of thing. In retrospect I'm glad I never did manage to get anywhere with it; losing my social life and activism was bad enough, but at least I didn't lose my livelihood at the same time. Still, it's an interesting trouser-leg of time to contemplate.

I guess this is why I do things like read my employer's social impact reports. It's nice to know that the work I'm doing is helping other people make a difference in the world, even if it doesn't feel like I'm doing it myself.