Clocking Week and Laser Week
Posted on the 22nd of June 2008 at 10:40 by Bodil
This week was laser week. I went and had my face mutilated on Tuesday, and I’m only just beginning to recover in time for the next working week. This means, of course, that I’ve been male at work for three whole depressing days while my face worked out its burn damage.
But let’s go back a bit further. The week before laser week was a bad one. I guess my biorhythms must have bottomed out or something; it was like being back to last year, feeling every look from people on the street as a clocking look, sure I couldn’t pass for a brick, let alone a woman. Every time I looked in a mirror, I’d see the Man in a Dress.
You may have your ideas about how to pass. You may have decided the voice is the most crucial part, or the way you move, or how well your makeup covers the maleness, or any of a number of superficial details. Forget all that. The crucial element is the Mindset. If you think of yourself as female, completely and unequivocally, then you are female. The world simply adjusts itself around this simple fact. Call it the Law of Attraction if you like–I’d phrase it in less pop-cultural terms, but the idea is the same: your mind shapes reality, and if you know you are female, then others will know too.
Sadly, I knew no such thing last week. I was the Man in a Dress, and reality moulded itself around me to fit this perception. The most disturbing thing happened that weekend: I’d been out partying with some friends, and when I got home and removed the makeup, I beheld my maleness in the bathroom mirror and thought, “you know, I look pretty good like this.”
Fortunately, come Monday my confidence was restored, and Bodil was back in all her irresistible glory. I was even whistled at in the street. How cruel, then, to face Laser Tuesday and a week of enforced maleness just as I was getting back into stride.
Here are the gruesome details of the recovery period. Sorry, but it’s still important, at least to me, to record this. As usual, days one and two were only redness and a hint of swelling, which a few applications of cortisone successfully kept under control. Days three and four saw moderate pimple outbreaks, which were slowing down by day five, and today, day six, only one pimple popped out overnight. My face is speckled with ex-pimples, but they’re healing nicely, and I think it’ll be down to an acceptable level tomorrow, in time for the start of the working week.
Oh, and I’ve had my ears pierced. I can’t wait for the recommended six weeks to pass so I can take those damned studs out–they’re in the way, all the time; they snag on clothing, they snag on the pillow when I sleep, I’ve nearly torn them out by accident when towelling on several occasions. Just five more weeks now, and I can replace them with something appropriately geekier. I can’t wait…
I’ve also, you may have noticed, tweaked the look of the site slightly–it now looks the same across all platforms and browsers, pretty much, and I’ve scaled things down a bit so they don’t just look silly on anything but my 1920x1200 laptop display. I was hoping to make the layout small enough that it would fit on my Nokia E90 display, but that didn’t quite work out. I guess I’ll just leave that as it is until I decide I have to rewrite the CSS to work on the iPhone.
God help me, I think I might buy an iPhone… Really, it’s a downgrade in so many ways from my E90, which has everything: a massive display (800 pixels wide, dammit), QWERTY keyboard, 3.5G, wifi, GPS, an awesome camera, 8GB worth of storage space, even a Python interpreter. And yet, it doesn’t have a touchscreen. And that, sadly, makes all the difference. I could wait for Android to start showing up in the wild, of course, or wait for Nokia to do something awesome with their recent acquisition of Trolltech. But I’m not good at waiting, and Apple is finally releasing their fashionable lump of evil in Norway any minute now. I think I’m about to give in and buy my first Apple product. Oh, but the Mactards are gonna gloat…
By the way: stop by here on Tuesday evening if you want to try out the Bodil Maps secret beta. Bodil Maps (which is only an internal codename, sadly) is the project I’ve been working on for the last four months: a complete rewrite of the positively backwards map engine on Gule Sider. Bodil Maps will make Google cry.
