A belated update
2008-07-22 21:40 -
I can’t believe three months have gone by so quickly since I last wrote. I’d predicted that “the next few months [would] pass in the blink of an eye”, but I didn’t expect things to be this smooth. I won’t even bother trying to commit to a regular schedule of writing at this point – last summer, I tried to blog at minimum once a week, but I can hardly find the time and motivation to pick out noteworthy events to muse on even once every quarter.
My trips to Cambridge for work/ROFLcon and Santa Monica for work/Ditch Day turned out quite well – I got to visit with friends, stay in touch, and be extremely productive on projects with folks in Cambridge/Santa Monica. I haven’t traveled since, but am hoping to do something between now and my upcoming trip with “R” in late September. I’ve started regaining parts of my family – I met with my aunt and her family while I was in Cambridge, and found full support. I also had a post-Thailand reunion with Dale in Boston – our coincidence of having SRSes and birthdays one day apart is still remarkable to me.
Now that I’ve been at Google for nearly 6 months, I’ve started to get used to the rhythm, just as I got used to the rhythm of Caltech. Things are not nearly as imbalanced in terms of cycles of short vacations, regular classes, the hell that is finals week, and summer – there’s a weekly cycle of setting goals for the week, reacting to breakage, and spending the rest of the time on projects and a quarterly cycle of team-wide goals, but I can generally go home on Friday and not need to think about work until Monday morning (unless I’m carrying the pager). For some reason, I seem to be a page magnet – I tend to get twice as many pages during my shifts as my colleagues do. My first project shipped, and I’ve been super super busy keeping a number of other plates spinning – I have both my 20% project and a new project with a hard deadline that’s coming up in the next few weeks in addition to the outreach work I’ve been doing with women and CS/games. I’m on call this week (oncall week #3), but have still managed to make time to hang out with “S” and her friends and cook/play board games.
With regard to my SRS, my 1-year anniversary passed last month without incident and I find myself in maintenance mode – dilating at minimum twice a week, but really having a good deal of latitude as to how early or late I do it. I’ve reintroduced the medium size to my regimen and haven’t been having problems – in fact, it makes dealing with the small after a few days’ gap a TON easier. I’m satisfied with my depth, happy with the cosmetic appearance, and happy ecstatic with the sensitivity. The entire ordeal of last year feels like a distant blur, and the awkwardness of my childhood seems like an dreary fog which has since burned off and been replaced with bright sunshine. Now that I’ve settled for the intermediate future, I’m finally getting a regular primary care physician and will be seeing her tomorrow to get everything checked out. Still no birth certificate – the California Office of Vital Records is facing budget cuts, so chances are that from the time of one’s SRS, it takes about 15+ months to get an updated birth certificate – 3 months for a court date, 2 months for the OVR to acknowledge receipt of the forms, and 10 months of processing time.
I’m also now 21 (yay!) – “R” and I put together a banquet at a local Chinese restaurant to celebrate and 14 of my friends came. I was disappointed, though, that my parents didn’t contact me on my birthday, and that they excluded me from a family gathering soon afterwards to celebrate July 4th. “R” and I ended up dropping by to say hi anyways, and having dessert with them. What followed was interesting – I finally got to see my parents and my childhood home again for the first time in nearly three years and was elated. Sadly, the feelings were not exactly mutual – my parents felt imposed upon and uncomfortable with me. I’m hoping these feelings pass over time. Afterwards, “R” and I went out to dinner at a local restaurant that was still open after all these years I’d been away and walked around Montclair a bit. It was quite romantic.
Over the past few months, my interest in WoW has fluctuated quite a bit. The guild merger I alluded to in my last post went south, and my old guild pretty much fell apart. I spent two months barely signing in, before I resolved to try out a different guild and join some of my friends who had left Amitie. Perseid has been very fun for me, and I’ve already been able to contribute to the guild’s progression in SSC/TK a small bit.
All in all, things are asymptotically approaching normality. I’ve fully blended into ordinary society in the Bay Area – I’m just another woman you pass on the street in Mountain View or Sunnyvale or Santa Clara (okay, fine, I’m unusual, I’m a woman wearing a pager, we comprise 5% or less of the folks in the field of operations, but that’s a digression…). I happen to have a unique past and choose to write about it openly, but it no longer directly affects me on a day to day basis. My story could be called a ‘successful’ transition, but there are thousands, perhaps tens or hundreds of thousands, of stories like mine that aren’t out there in the open but exist nevertheless.
P.S. When I got the bill for the urgent care visit from my UTI, I wasn’t nearly as amused by the pregnancy test. I hadn’t yet paid my deductible, so I was out $300 for a prescription for ciproflaxin (a bottle of which I already had from Thailand) and a negative pregnancy test result.
