It’s hard to function without separating fact from fiction. A follow-up to my post about the greatest fact-checking lesson of my life.
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The 40th anniversary of one of the greatest tragedies in American history reminds me of the greatest lesson in fact-checking I ever had. A timely blog post nearly four decades in the making.
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As a child, I dreamed an entire commercial, or as it probably should be termed, a full-music-video PSA. I decided after all these years to write about it.
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A pause on my Monday morning to post a foreword of sorts to what I plan to be a series of blog posts celebrating and processing the first anniversary of my coming out as transgender.
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Coming full circle with my long-ago desire to be like Cher in one particular scene in “Moonstruck.”
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Published September 1, 2018
Peace has too often eluded me, but I woke up from a powerful dream this morning with an unprecedented calm that feels like how I’m guessing a person at peace must feel.
I was at the house that our family moved into when I was a teenager. My parents, both gone now, were younger in the dream than when we lived there. They were complaining that I had broken a part of a doorway leading to the back patio. I had not.
“Let’s just blame Carly,” I said, angrily. “Everyone will believe she did it. Let’s blame her.”
That seemed to satisfy my dad, who got a beer out of the refrigerator and tilted the top of the unopened bottle in my direction as if air-clinking glasses with me for a virtual toast.
I’m laughing after typing all of that, because of course I am. I immediately knew that the point of the dream was not to be found in the particulars of what I had or hadn’t done.
Peace
That was just context, a setting. What has me at peace is that I referred to myself in the dream as Carly, and with female pronouns, to a mom and dad who gave me a different name that was put on a birth certificate that calls me a boy. I remember the spirit of my dad’s words better than I do the specifics, and taken together with his beer-bottle salute, it said, “OK.”
With me being well into my transition and life as a transgender woman, it felt like acceptance that I cannot get from him in the three-dimensional world I live and communicate in while awake. I have a new name, and a new gender identity, and I am beyond happy that my subconscious mind used them in a seemingly unrelated conversation with my parents.
I also have a new feeling, and a new tag on my growing list of blog post tags.
Peace.
Photo by lzf via Shutterstock
Published August 16, 2018
Danny had been on my mind lately. The reasons, like life, were a series of seemingly random events and circumstances that somehow worked together to point in a certain direction. Then, on Monday morning, I got the call telling me that he was gone.
Oof, as Danny often said. Oof, as if reacting to a body blow, a gut punch. That’s how it felt.
I’m writing this during my private candlelight vigil for Remy Daniel Miller II, whose funeral Mass is six hours (and two time zones) away as I begin this remembrance of the friend I met during our freshman year of high school. What would he think, I wonder, if he knew that my apartment building prohibits candles, forcing me to improvise with a battery-powered version and a Shutterstock image? My guess is he’d allow it.
Why had Danny been on my mind lately? For starters, two other high school friends — both of them one year my senior — visited me five weeks ago, stirring up memories that began flooding back a few weeks earlier when they told me they’d booked their flight. Flipping through yearbooks put a lot of names and faces back on my radar. And around that time, I reconnected with a classmate, the one who called me with the bad news Monday.
Published June 17, 2018
Lady Bird was released in December, but I didn’t get around to watching it until awards season, just before the Oscars. I meant to write something about it sooner, but life got in the way. I loved it enough to buy it, and I re-watched it this weekend.
Published May 3, 2018
My desire to see “The Post” owed mostly to my long career in newspapers, but motivations are often complex, and that was true about my interest in this movie. A believer in the role that newspapers have as watchdog, I felt an extra pull to view Tom Hanks as Ben Bradlee and Meryl Streep as Katharine Graham. Those characters, the editor and the publisher of The Washington Post at the time of the controversial public disclosure of the Pentagon Papers, have been well known to me for decades.