Tina's not-so-secret diary 📓🔓

[07:45] Ok, I really need this Halloween to not go as badly as it did in 2022. Okay? That was stupid and bogus all around. Actually, the entire last quarter of 2022 was stupid and bogus. At least I'm on HRT this year. The thought that the corporate feudal theocratic complex would block my transition at every turn was really making me want to kill myself back then. That's why I feel so bad by proxy for all the pre-HRT transgirls who want HRT but are either afraid to ask or have asked and were rejected. Honey, I understand COMPLETELY. You still matter, ok? I still love you no matter what. ("Oh, Tina can't possibly be talking to me, she doesn't even know me." I don't NEED to know you. We're telepathically linked—I AM talking to you and I love you SO MUCH.)

So, on that score, I'm gonna be ok this year. I guess, what else do I have to worry about? Oh, i'll come up with something. It won't be relevant or important, but I'll come up with something.

[07:50] Last night, I had a dream where I was pregnant and it made my belly button pop out. That was apparently based on a random thought I'd had earlier in the day yesterday, where I wished I could make that happen. Really, the pregnancy wasn't particularly relevant to the rest of the dream since it never featured again after that. The rest of the dream was about Star Trek, The Sims, and Gritty from the Philadelphia Flyers.

[14:53] Talking of pregnancy; there's a woman (let's call her "Rachel") about my age who lives in the other half of the building. She's been pregnant twice since she's lived here, but I've never seen her with a newborn. They're her kids, I've seen them occasionally; someone they call "grandma" brings them by, and I hear them call Rachel "mom". However, they don't live with her. Certainly, there's about 4 reasons for this that I can think of offhand, but around here? Let's just say, that's one adventure I don't envy. How do you stay sane, carrying a baby or 2 for 37-40 weeks and then immediately have to hand them off to someone else? I'm not talking about, like, adoption or surrogacy, but these are your kids. You and your penis-haver SO made them, you grew them in your uterus for 9 months. You spend all that time planning and worrying and talking to attorneys and stuff, and then your water breaks. You go to hospital, you push your baby out, and a caseworker in a suit flashes a bit of paper at the maternity ward doctor, then you leave with nothing. How do you not snap? How do you not grab the first gun you can find and take your newborn by force? How do you not travel up the lift and leap off the hospital's carpark? What gives this caseworker the right to decide you're not entitled to keep your own kids? And then, as though you're not compartmentalising enough pain, your mom gives you a litany of things you've done wrong and accuses you of draining society's resources (direct quote from a conversation I accidentally overheard). HOW? How does anyone endure that and continue living? If it were me, I couldn't do it.
Let me make it clear, I'm pro-choice. The corporate feudal state makes money by compelling people into having babies that they don't want or can't take care of because "it says so in the Bible". Rachel has never been given the chance. Abortion is still legal in this state (and even if it weren't, it's legal in Colorado and Minnesota; easily within driving distance for someone whose car works) but she never got one. She would be a great mom if someone would just fucking let her.

[08:26] Right now, I'm dressed as femme as I can get with my current wardrobe. I'm wearing my red button-down shirt unbuttoned over my sports bra, my red headband I made from the sleeve of a worn-out teeshirt I used to paint in, and my baggiest pair of trackpants, pulled up to the fold above my hips. I'm wearing pink lipstick and blue eyeshadow, and I feel so beautiful right now I have no words. Whenever I look into the mirror, I see one of the most beautiful women I've ever laid eyes on. I made it. I made it out of the dark tunnel. I never thought I could, but I did. I didn't just survive, I thrived. If you're wembling about looking into HRT, even if you're into your 40s, 50s, whatever, let this be your notice to make a doctor's appointment and ask.

[01:02] It sure would be nice to know who built all the houses in The Sims Classic. While I couldn't find that information, I did discover that my sarcastic writing skill is due to Roxy Wolosenko, TS1's catalogue writer. Whenever I make a new object, I try to sound as much like her as possible in the catalogue description. The other games tried, but it turns out there was never another Roxy. Do you suppose Roxy Moxy from The Urbz was named after her? I don't know, "Roxy" or "Roxann" is a somewhat common name. It's just as likely she was named after Roxann Dawson from Star Trek: Voyager.

[07:30] Well, this is the last day for the trial that I didn't get selected for. So, it'd be REAL NICE if I could stop obsessing over not talking to that girl, thank you. There will be other girls. Probably. Also, it doesn't look like I got covid or anything else from accidentally forgetting the plague mask. So that's good.

[07:43] Taking a walk early in the morning makes me feel closer to myself, to nature, and to my surroundings than any other time of the day. Is that God? Does that count as God? Not a Christian facsimile but a tangible inner tranquility. Something definite and observable, yet mysterious and fascinating. Only, it's the other way around from how people normally define God—it did not create me, I created it, yet at the same time, it defines me as a person.

[17:53] Sometimes, it's the little things that give me gender euphoria. Tying my teeshirt into a crop top, putting my hair into pigtails, or putting on a headband for instance. Sometimes though, I need to go further and put on makeup and the Shein top I accidentally got from Goodwill without realising it the other week. All my makeup just came from, like, the dollar store. But I don't care. It works just fine. While I don't recommend makeup for everyone, it's a big part of the reason why I transed my gender, so hey. No matter what I did to myself pre-transition, I never felt manly enough to be called "manly". But, now, as a woman, all I need to do to feel pretty is one of those things. Just one or more of those really simple things. Last night, I combined pigtails, makeup, and 2nd-hand shein top, and I felt beautiful. Yeah. I couldn't feel manly, but I can feel beautiful, and that's the whole reason why we're doin' this.

[09:54] I'm still reeling from jury selection last week. The trial's over in a couple days and I'm still fixating on last week. I really could have used the $35 per diem for a 10-day trial... but I'm glad I didn't get selected. Is that wrong of me? Like, leading up to voir dire, I was envisioning someone who was demonstrably innocent being wrongfully charged and imprisoned for a crime they didn't commit. But--and I hate to bring this up--the defendant is white. When it comes to prosecuting white people, the state tends to do its due diligence. There was enough probable cause to go forward with a criminal trial in this case. The judge told us all to respond to the questions as truthfully as possible, and I told the prosecutor what I thought. I was dismissed. It's over.

[10:11] I can't figure out the logic behind forbidding the knowledge of not only sexuality, but genitalia. It's straight-up considered sexual assault for an adult to talk openly about sex in front of a minor in this state. The SOR is overflowing with people who did nothing more heinous than say "vagina" within earshot of a child. How is anyone supposed to realise they're intersex unless they know how to recognise it? More than just "gay" and "straight", it's an otherwise simple conversation about genitalia. "These are the male parts, these are the female parts, oh wait I have a little of both. Oh wait, I don't really have either. What's that? 'Intersex'? Okay, thanks dad, you're the greatest!" Seriously. Instead, you've got to wait to get pantsed in 5th grade and have people start throwing rocks through your window in middle school before you catch on that anything is wrong. I'm not intersex, and statistically it's not very common. But, discounting it on those grounds alone is like building your new school without wheelchair ramps and a locked elevator because--oh, okay I get it now. Statistical outliers have no place in civilised society, I forgot. There's no logic. There's only evangelist "disease-as-punishment" dogma and "normal" is defined by the corporate feudal theocratic complex.

[10:31] I have GOT to stop looking out the window. All I ever do is pry into people's personal lives, so like, just STOP it, Tina! Oy gevalt!

[11:16] Have you ever forgotten a piece of information, and then it comes back to you so hard at an unexpected time that it just knocks you off your track? It's the kind of thing that makes perfect sense, yet kinda makes you want to bang your head against a wall at the same time. No? That's just a "me" deal? Okay fine. Like, of course it makes sense that you, random person I will not be naming here, would call the central figure of your cult "Jocasta". I just didn't think you'd be so blatant about it, that's all.

[17:28] I realised just now that i said my jury duty was in October. It was actually set to start today. Decidedly not October. In general, I wouldn't make a very good juror, because I tend to second-guess myself a lot. On E, I second-guess myself and then feel guilty about whatever decision I make. That was sort of an esoteric thing that wouldn't have come across as anything more than an excuse if I'd said that; but I was NOT ready to put myself into a situation where I was 1/12 of a deciding factor in ending a person's life, or being shown crime-scene photos of a dead child and hearing witness testimony that would have driven me to existential nihilism again. You just can't heap that kind of responsibility on me and say, "here, decide this". Fortunately, my views on the legalisation of cannabis made me unworthy of a seat on this particular jury. I firmly believe that the only reason cannabis is illegal in most of the United States is to compel Black and Brown people into crime. It's a simple matter for a cop to plant a dime-bag on someone he pulls over for expired tags and BAM! Mandatory 10-year minimum sentence. The prosecutor didn't like my answer, so I was dismissed. I don't ever have to hear someone call me "Mister Rosenthal" ever again, B"H.

[17:39] Why do I get tongue-tied talking to pretty girls, but I can just blurt out "hey, how you doin'" to some rando at the bus stop? I couldn't bring myself to say more than "Sorry, excuse me" to an EXTREMELY cute girl at the jury selection. I could already tell we had at least 1 thing in common... but I was dressed like a boring man. At least I don't smell like deodorant anymore, but I'm throwing that outfit into the rubbish. I never want it to touch my skin again.

[17:48] Also, relating to yesterday's entry, I'm definitely just lonely. I wish I knew what to do about that without a functional car.

[00:00] I've always been pretty ambivalent about football. I don't know most of the terminology, and I don't know enough to appreciate a game if I watched one. When I was a kid, I always saw sports of any kind as a profound waste of time. I'm probably the only one in this city who couldn't care less about Huskers football. As I've gotten older though, I've started to realise something about each year's team: the only reason they tended to lose a lot in past years was because I don't believe the kids on the team actually wanted to play football. Actually, I have enough to say here that it needs a blog post.

[14:21] Sitting here, pointlessly browsing around my website like a kid playing "Office", opening and closing file drawers; trying to figure out if this Baby Fever is the result of a genuine desire to add more humans to the planet or is just hormonal. I'm tired of randomly thinking I should be pregnant right now (despite having no ovaries or uterus of any description), feeling empty, and crying. I'd like that to stop, please.

[23:56] I hate Husker home game days. Stuff gets really weird, especially at the beginning of the season. Today's diary continued under tomorrow's heading because I got here late.

[11:15] All of my similar-age relatives are married with children at this stage, all the grandparents and great-aunts are dead, and now my mum's generation are starting to die off. The conservative uncle who puts Ebenezer Scrooge to shame I spoke of in November has inoperable cancer; he'll be the first death in my family's Boomer generation. It just makes me think of how everything has been changing around me while I've been standing still. My mum tells me that I have changed, but I know those changes are only internal to me. They don't affect anyone else, and, if I were to tell anyone about them, they wouldn't regard it as a substantive change. The problem here is drinking and smoking. I realised this when my previous next-door neighbour, who appeared slightly younger than me, would go out on his deck and drink a beer and smoke a cigarette like Mr. Anderson from Beavis & Butthead. I don't do either of those because, A. my dad was an alcoholic and I don't want to take the chance that I am too, B. smoking never piqued my interest, and C. that was something that grown-ups did, not kids like me. I guess that's what "rite of passage" or "coming of age" means. I never did that, so I never passed from childhood to adulthood. As a result, I'm still doing basically what I did in high school, with certain minor differences. In my head, I'm still 18, walking back from the park with my same-age cousin after having the cops called on us because we were LARPing GoldenEye with costume accessory guns. My uncle is still 45 and working as an accountant for AMD. My mum is still 47 and working as a caseworker at the state welfare office. Married? Pregnant? Dying? No one's married, pregnant, or dying around here, mate!

[11:48] Re: the previous entry. Yeah, I'm not gonna be able to wait the full year to start progesterone like I thought. This hormonal depression is gonna kill me before then, I can just tell.

[11:45] Well, another welfare interview. Whenever I answer their questions, I always feel like I'm committing perjury even though I'm not. It seems like every time i have to do one of these, there's some new regulation that the republicans put in place to disqualify me, personally. Also, this was the first time I've admitted out loud to anyone that I have a medical condition worse than a burned finger. Didn't much care for that.

[17:36] Relationship Advice from the Year 2000: if your SO makes a sim that looks like you, that's a love letter. If your SO makes a sim that looks like you and moves them into a house with their own simself, that's a marriage proposal. Next featured story: How to ask your husband for a divorce using Roller Coaster Tycoon.

[15:00] Signing up for government assistance always makes me feel like I'm half an inch tall. I've been filling out this same form in some appearance or another for almost 15 years and I've made no meaningful changes in my life that would let me stop. My own government is so keen for me to die, sometimes I feel like obliging. The only thing that keeps me going is "transwomen need to exist just to spite all the FARTs", but is just existing enough? Why can't I live? Why do I need to just "exist"?