It worked! It is great! It is awesome!! I didn't have Netflix here in San Francisco because even with the expanded Verizon plan, I had to limit my bandwidth. Cable TV came with the building but a few months ago I had it taken out because I didn't watch it.

I could not re-adapt back to commercials every five minutes or less, no choice of content or time. Regular basic cable was depressing and stressful. I'm listening to commercials on alternative radio and they startle me. Most aren't as bad as the TV ones are. Like many people, I just don't bother because it isn't fun. It's more fun playing a game or watching a download or something.

i haven't had movies much since I moved here. With losing my Verizon bill and getting the meals that heal plan - five hot meals a week Monday through Friday to help my budget - I might be able to afford Netflix again. I missed it ever since I moved, especially on bad days when I wasn't up to actually doing anything more active.

Just got my reminder call for my doctor's appointment tomorrow. Big exhausting day. Leave at 9:30am to get my shot from the nurse at 10:30am, then wait down there till 1pm for doctor appointment and seek out the hospital social worker in between since I'm down there anyway. Hope to feel good enough to be coherent with teh social worker. Getting help with transportation to my medical appointments would be another big budget move. Every trip for anything is $2 each way, $4 for the appointment or event.

I will have a $70 termination fee on Verizon but the lady there counseled me to just wait 30 days and ask for a payment plan on it, since I dont' think I could come up with all of it at once. I'll send partial payments to carve it down but I'm not going to rush on it, not when I do have another service and I'm not cut off from the world if I'm late. I can be realistic now about that. LOVE the new broadband!

Went off the wagon on the "edit an hour a day" because my days don't match Earth's days and if anything else takes concentration or too much time, I don't have the energy for it. Editing does take more work than rough drafting.

But I can average it because the days I did were 3 or 4 hour stints. If I go for 7 hours a week minimum that I can keep up.

Today's happy distraction, an intake appointment for Salvation Army's "Meals that Heal" program. I'm getting hot meals five days a week. Out of an entire month's menu there are only three or four that might be too spicy for me to eat, most of it I can eat. They lean toward things I not only can eat but actively enjoy, tomorrow it stars with Swedish meatballs and beef-barley soup. MMMM two favorites.

That will help cut the impossible food budget and add in things I can't afford, like, meat and veggies. I've been living mostly on rice, ramen, potatoes, onions, oatmeal, corn meal, pasta and hominy grits, all things I can buy in bulk and eat simple, with butter or olive oil. The one big expense is the olive oil healthier than margarine and used whenever it'd taste as good or better in order to cut back the butter. I'm not trying to lose weight. I don't eat enough to maintain my weight and have been losing weight rather dramatically since the last time I tightened my belt.

Instead I sort of count calories to try to get in enough in a day. I dropped about 15 pounds due to eating less by skipping meals and some foodless days when I first lost the money and wasn't prepared to, have been having bad days toward the end of the month. Beverages other than coffee went by the wayside a long time ago. I don't afford soda when I could get a can of Vienna sausages to have some meat in my diet or a pack of hot dogs or a canned stew dinner once a week. no fridge so everything's nonperishable.

I'm good at living on th echeap but there are a lot of cool things on these meals that I don't bother buying because they're sides. Beef barley soup - it's not enough calories to be a meal for the day beacuse soups are too light. Soup is not cost effective when I'm trying to get in enough calories to live.

They put salads in about half the meals. I can't eat raw veggies and salad dressings make me sick, but I'm going to deconstruct the salads, cook anything that can be cooked in the microwave and put it into ramen for a second meal of the day when it has salads. No sense throwing away fresh produce just because I have to rinse salad dressing off it, especially if someone else cut it up and it's just putting it in the sink with the water running for a bit. Anything unpalatable that can be reworked, I'm going to eat it. Any veggies I don't like by themselves, like peas, can go in ramen where it's tolerable but adds nutrition.

Though I must really crave them bceasue the last time I got a TV dinner, I ate the green beans and they tasted good. This is like "gatorade tastes good" feeling, I hate green beans so if they taste good my body's craving it.

I am so relieved I finally got into a program. Whatever these meals are, it's food I didn't have before and I'm able to afford it.

I've been sitting on an ever-growing stack of science fiction and fantasy novels since I published Raven Dance in 2000. Every year I participate in NaNoWriMo and usually the 3 Day Novel contest too, either officially or just by spending Labor Day Weekend writing a new short novel.

I just keep writing them and stacking them up in my hard drive. Editing is a daunting task especially when all of them have the same problems that I need to overcome in order to produce good professional quality work. I decided to go indie some time back after watching the way the publishing industry changed and keeps changing.

90% of the delays are due to physical or financial hardship. I'm a disabled 58 year old transman who only worked full time for about a decade and never did get ahead enough to get past basic survival, let alone pay for needed medical care. I never got insurance because I was trans and I wasn't going to take that money out of necessities like rent and bills and food for self and significant other if it didn't cover my gender reassignment treatment. Disability, trans and aging all combined to a perfect storm and I was homeless for a long time, sub-marginal long before I was homeless, sub-marginal all through the 90s even if some of that was actually one of my most prosperous times in terms of physical comforts.

The other 10% is something uglier. Self acceptance, choice of living stealth or being out of the closet and wimping out on my GBLT themes and social science fiction themes. I've sweated over that all along.

If the right thing to do is stand up for my rights and link arms with anyone else who's gotten oppressed for any reason (which does make for a pretty HUGE majority), then I should write my brooks true to my view of life and just find my readership. Trust that it's out there. Trust that some people will read a blog entry about transgender issues and find out I do SFF and check it out because they are sick of wimpy princesses who don't act like real ones, sick of main characters always being straight-white-cisgender-male, sick of science fiction that doesn't question society and make you think. I definitely fall closer to Ursula K. LeGuin and Ray Bradbury and all than I do to the current crop of rocket men.

I don't even have anything against the quest of the rocket men.

I don't think it's pointless to reach for the stars. I think that's a lot better thing to do as a human endeavor than 'try to kill off lots of other people for their customs/religion/want their stuff' and it can solve other problems on Earth because good science is not a waste of effort.

It's just that's not my story. No matter how much some of it looks like fantasy fiction, it's actually social SF about culture and adapting to technology and interacting with people who aren't like you. It's what it is and I'm who I am. So maybe this post is like those moments heroes decide to do the dang fated thing anyway. It beats not doing it by a lot, because not doing it is stupid and doesn't solve anything.

I never could run. I had to learn to fight.

A couple of days ago, a good friend of mine from online texted me and we talked about why I have not been online for months - pretty much all of 2013 and for some time before that my participation dropped in all the areas where I'm active. The problem is financial. I had to cut back my Internet service from the $80 a month I spent to have enough bandwidth for my real usage to the shorter time on the $50 a month two year contract I had with Verizon. I told my friend I'd be back in August when that contract's over, since I intended to get a cheaper service with unlimited usage even if it was slower.

She totally blew me away. She bought me AT&T U-verse and Thursday is the start date for my new service. Wednesday is when UPS delivers my hardware to self-install. This is going to be fantastic. I can end my isolation and go back to living online.

I'm mostly shut-in. I go out to the hospital every two weeks to get my shot from a nurse and I go out every Monday afternoon to see my therapist, that's about it. Three days a week, home care workers come in to clean my room, help me bathe and cook some food for me. Without hanging out online I was way too isolated and when SSI started taking more out of my check for money I'd earned before, I went below a level where I could cover necessities like the Internet. I tightened my belt and I stopped entire online activities like Facebook or forums or blogging cold turkey. It was the only way I could cut back that actually worked. It would cost more if I went over my usage than if I'd paid that $30 more than my contract to get 10 gig rather than 5 gig. I limited it to personal chats with a very short list of close intimates and even stopped doing email for months because it was too depressing (and used up too much bandwidth with all the things I read in email.)

Next step - when the new service is installed I'll contact Verizon and see if there's a fee for early termination. Hopefully it's cheaper than just paying the bill for the last couple of months would be. I could be eating better in June. Yes, it's gotten that tight to where I had days of not eating - but my cat still has food and good food. My priorities are solid and his hairball formula comes in big bags for economy. I'm so glad he prefers dry food.

In my last article there's a major tip I forgot to put in or emphasize. Really, really important one, something that saved my life hundreds of times.

If you are LBGTQ - QUILTBAG - youth at risk, The Trevor Project has an incredible hotline. 866 488 7386 is the number.

There's also a National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255 - this one is good too and I haven't had any discrimination from them when I bring up transgender issues. Only support and understanding. Once in a blue moon I'm educating someone on the line but they're open to it and listen supportively. It's rare because I'm probably not the first one who called, discrimination kills.

Suicide hotlines are a tremendously good idea. They are free. The hotliner is trained not to be judgmental. There is nothing more effective in releasing and bringing down the level of any emotional or physical trauma than being able to talk about it with someone who's attentively listening, cares, and doesn't try to give a lot of pointless advice.

I am alive today because I call those hotlines if I even start to think about it. I have never been involuntarily hospitalized or locked up because I used a hotline. It is safe to tell a hotliner anything. I came out transgender to hotliners when I was living stealth and couldn't stand it in Chicago. I did this even as a teenager when I was dead scared that my grandparents would find out and throw me into an institution - and was listened to and accepted.

It makes a huge difference. Use that resource. If you volunteer on one, thank you. Also please, take care of yourself afterward. Secondhand stress can become a cumulative burden. So taking care of your own feelings and feeling better afterward can save you a lot of heartache. Think of me and all the folks you do save when you're out there doing that. You're brave and good and doing something as needed as fire fighting.

I am starting to pull out of the flare and PTSD reactions from Monday morning's trauma. It was a particularly extreme incident of disconfirmation, something that was more like a New York homeless shelter experience than anything that I'd ever experienced or heard of in San Francisco. But this is still San Francisco.

When I went in to see my doctor on Wednesday morning, I had panic attacks and triggered just on going downstairs, so that was no good. I bulled through it and went to my appointment, explained that my PTSD was going off and so my blood pressure wasn't going to be normal and I was already doing what I could to calm down from the panic attack. They were understanding about it. Most of all my doctor asked what happened and when I explained it, she came up with a San Francisco solution.

I need to get the contact number for the group and give it to her, so she can arrange a training for the people involved. Wow. They do that here. It makes a difference. It's not "whistle blowers get stomped on." They solve the problem - I have done what I could to educate the people involved and they didn't get it. But cisgender experts are sometimes listened to over people who actually have the situation.

This is true of medical chronic stuff too, it helps to bring a healthy person to the doctor's office on initial visits to explain what your problem is because the doctor's looking at your body and listening to your voice tone as a diagnostician, ignoring what you say in favor of how you say it and guessing the most common reasons for your symptoms.

It also takes about three days for someone who's having trouble accepting or understanding transgender to wrap their heads around it and get over the initial shock. There is one. For many people it shatters their world view and even though they do come to understand, they're not going to understand on the spot. It's more important to put in the time and effort to calm down and think about it and accept it, take care of your feelings instead of taking them out on the transgender person. Just saying "I need time to deal with this" when someone comes out is a lot politer than telling them they're not who they say they are because they don't look like what you expect.

Pain level ten always brings thoughts of suicide. That's my definition of pain level ten - it's when death starts looking better than going on putting up with the pain, when it's gotten so bad there is nothing but the pain. So I've had well over fifty years of finding ways to fight the temptation to kill myself. Demonstrably, I succeeded.

I will add that at no time has anyone else intervened in my life to stop me. I can think of a few times when those around me were tacitly making it easy, like leaving a clinically depressed child diagnosed with suicidal tendencies alone for hours in a basement room right next to an unlocked gun room with over 50 firearms and enough ammunition to hold off the Russian army. I would've had time to melt down the slugs and craft a reload to shoot myself with if I'd actually gotten down to doing it. I didn't tell the shrinks at the time because I didn't want that door locked. I wanted my options open.

There are different things people do to deal with the pain. Whatever the pain is, when it gets to the point of suicide, I treat that as pain level ten and respect it. I respect their reasons for being that hurt even if they may seem trivial to me. Most of all I'm aware that sometimes something trivial can make the difference between life and death.

I've also known someone I loved at the time who decided not to kill himself because he hadn't seen the next episode of a science fiction show PBS was airing in a couple of days. He chose to live because of that show. We were big fans. Fortunately, it turned out to be one of the best episodes of the entire series when we sat down together to watch it.

Anything that makes a person want to live at that point is worth it. That's not for someone outside to judge, especially if they're trying to help that person come back to the world of the living. I don't actually know what it's like for people who find relief with drugs or alcohol, when that temporarily blots out the pain. Only that for many addicts it does and they have a big physical problem with their brain chemistry being unable to function without that chemical unless they go through a lengthy difficult recovery process.

Drug/alcohol addiction is its own big topic anyway. It's an entire social process and maybe that's where some of the "ease the pain" goes away. Both drunks and recovering drunks have massive social support for their new, simpler identities as drunks or drunks in recovery. It's common for them to have been abused in childhood. Social wounds may actually get relief from social support, who'd a thought that? To me, that's a huge part of why AA works - what people take to drinking for gets provided without the booze and in a way that encourages personal growth.

But let's look at some other things. Junk food. Reading all the time, burying yourself in a book. Distraction. Burying yourself on the computer in game after game. Withdrawing from mainstream life into a narrow subculture.

When I was younger it used to be Dungeons and Dragons, table top role playing games. I threw over D&D for the Gurps system as soon as I found it, since the rules system was better for my style of storytelling and the setting was much more flexible, easier to adapt to give my games either an original backstory or base them on my current fandom. I wound up putting together not the giant support groups of AA and Al-Anon and their like, but a small six to twelve person intimate group of people all of whom knew me, liked me, had a reason to come over to my room and stay up all night.

That was a very big part of how I survived my pre-op years. Gaming. RPGs. Fictive universes. When I was with my long term ex, we gamed together, just a universe of two with a cast of thousands. Most of the games naturally had erotic subplots and assorted erotic or romantic plots. We met for the first time ten thousand times in a thousand different worlds and venues, which was as fun as it was the first time we actually did.

The biggest real reason we stopped having good sex was that my body energy ran out as I ground myself down on the treadmill of my 1980s Work Robot years. It takes a toll sleeping only on weekends and working 20 hour days and then madly spending it all as fast as it comes in so as to keep from jumping off a high building.

There is another one. Sex. This includes masturbation. If someone's thinking of dying, one-handed pleasure is a much better alternative to death. Orgasm can be an analgesic if you can get up to it with enough fantasy to let go of the reasons for the pain and fear. It's a particularly healthy one, it resets your nervous system for a little while and does wonders for brain chemistry.

I got disappointed with a lot of erotic fantasy for lacking fantasy elements though. I expected dragons, elves, magic, flying, your basic fifteen impossible mythic things to go on in the story. The normal stuff was dull, I didn't fancy myself a construction worker or rich guy in suit type to dom someone, I was more into the settings of my RPGs. Vampires, elves, dragons, aliens, the cool stuff. The window dressing of the other way I escaped from reality that was at many times in my life for real unendurable.

Many people escape how unendurable life is at its worst times by pretending that nothing bad ever happens to people who don't deserve it. This is one of the worst ways to face it. That idea sets you up for suicide at the first real injustice, with added self blaming and shame. It's surrendering to your worst enemies and validating their sadistic attacks. If you internalize the viewpoint of the oppressor, you collaborate in your own oppression.

Was that James Baldwin? It was one of the great black philosophers and poets. The ones who kept me alive and sane as a child, right along with the science fiction and fantasy writers. They talked about a reality that didn't deny injustice, a way of health that involved staring it down and not giving in - not down deep, not behind your eyes, never telling them that they're right to treat you like that.

There's more than enough real oppression in this world and this country for anyone to get depressed. There's more than enough real risk for anyone to get a bit paranoid. Staying on balance well enough to make it to work and live month to month on the edge of survival, whatever the actual income level of edge of survival is, that stresses people. A quarter of all Americans will be clinically depressed at some point in their lives.

Most of them have good reasons for it. So when you're trying to say something to help, the thing to say is to listen, let them tell the story. Take it seriously. Reflect what you heard well enough so that they know you actually did understand and care. The hardest thing anyone can do is listen to a gut-wrenching story and not be able to do anything to change what happened - but by listening, that is the one gift that makes a difference and can help.

Never, ever laugh at what they do to get through the night. It may sound silly to you but sometimes what matters is any reminder that anything in life is worth experiencing again, whether that is butter on mashed potatoes or next week's television program or that I hadn't been published yet and my book wasn't finished.

Why that's a rant.

I can't count the number of mental health professionals who disconfirmed my novels and my writing. Treated them as sick, treated it as a symptom, not an ambition or an avocation or a profession. Treated it as an unrealistic "grandiose delusion."

Yes. Something bad happened on Monday morning and I'm not ready to write about it. I'm not sure if I'll ever be ready. But I'm coming down from the flare and the PTSD reactions. I've turned to all my solitary comforts, mostly Diablo III, some junk food and a couple of new Terry Pratchett novels. "The Long Earth" by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter is excellent - not a screamingly funny book like Diskworld, good serious SF with incredibly grabby characters and fascinating premise.

I'm going to just take care of myself till my therapist comes back from her vacation next Monday, process everything as well as I can till then and not try to rush the process. I know that I will come through it and feel like myself again eventually, because I have been through worse. I'm still not going to let them win.

Last tip: pet the cat. That always helps. Purring and shedding on you will release endorphins, knock down the pain. A cat is incredibly supportive at times and majorly understanding. The cat does not agree with anyone who ever put you down. The cat's needs are simple and the cats' hearts are big. Substitute critter of choice if you're not a cat person. I am. Ari is my front line defense, he is right there whenever I feel down and will literally wash it away. When he does that, I feel better.

Amazing, how cat spit can change the way the world looks. But he means it with love and he makes me laugh and he's very sensitive to what's going on. He's also particularly happy because his big bag of good cat food arrived yesterday. 15 pound bag of super quality high protein food that is his top favorite brand, his own weight in cat food. Properly served one small handful at a time on demand, so it keeps its strong scent and freshness in the big sealed cat food tub.

I had a hard childhood. Numerous reasons for it, some of them political and some of them not. Physical disability would've made it hard even if I'd been raised by physically healthy and wealthy Unitarians who were completely accepting of everything about me that wasn't Normal.

I wasn't a normal child either. This week my therapist, the good one who comprehends fibromyalgia and physical disability as well as trans issues and emotional stuff, blew my mind again. She popped out with another zinger.

If I had been a normal child I wouldn't have survived my childhood.

That's a little freaky to contemplate. I don't have any memory of ever being like children are supposed to be. The biggest thing about me that everyone kept trying to pound out of me was lack of "innocence" i.e. gullibility.

I blew it off to having a high IQ at the time. That meant a lot to my parents. They crowed over it but also freaked out over it being "too high to be stable." I wasn't normal but that was a thing like having super powers, not entirely undesirable.

I didn't believe it was all my fault. Most abused children do. It gets beaten into them that they deserved it. I wound up getting punished so much that punishment lost all its meaning.

I've heard grown men raised by alcoholics tell me seriously "I'm a loser. I'm a total failure, no good at anything and never will be. My dad said that and it's true. It's just what I am, a loser."

I got told those same things. Exactly those words. I didn't believe it. Now I'm thinking back and feeling differently about what I was like as a kid. In some ways I've always just been myself. Not all the things that weren't normal about me were bad things.

My therapist was right. A normal child would have died. I didn't hate myself. I hated my situation, that isn't the same thing at all. I don't feel bad about it either. I still don't think Ignorance is a virtue.

I'm slowing down on my grand vacation, no longer playing Diablo III to the exclusion of everything else in my life. I even spent a day without playing it at all, though I have to admit most of that day I was sleeping and the rest was family time in chat. It's been great, it'll still be fun but it's no longer as completely immersive.

There are some ideas that slip into popular language and culture out of the business world. In the business world, these terms get crafted by clever people who want to control their work force. Maintaining an impersonal corporate policy lets any number of managers get away with major or minor abuses. Those are perks of the job and range from economic blackmail and bullying on up into flat out ripoffs.

Some companies, restaurant chains, routinely underpay workers. They trim some off the paycheck across the board with this or that excuse especially when the workers are tipped and they can pay less than minimum wage to begin with. They can bargain hard when people are desperate for work. Half a paycheck is better than none when survival's at risk.

What set me off thinking about this tonight is a sentence from a how to article about something that's essentially a toy. It was about organizing an iPod. The author said that having a disorganized iPod was "messy and unprofessional."

Excuse me?

Isn't an iPod your personal toy? Your music machine? Are you a professional music listener? Okay, there are a few people who are. A music critic probably does organize his or her iPod because it's important to keep new music separate from what's already been reviewed, that's part of the job. I organize my art supplies the same way, prioritizing review products I haven't tried yet so that I'll get around to reviewing them sooner.

But since when do you need to seem professional after work when goofing off? When you're on the bus listening to music? What if a disorganized iPod lets you keep your music collection fresh and interesting, as you stumble on favorites you forgot while trying to find the song you're looking for?

There are times and places for being professional. Showing up to a job interview is one of them. Heck, showing up on time to work is one of them, keeping up your tasks, going along with the dress code that you may well agree with because it helps define your status. Some of the guys in suits definitely wanted the suits and ties lifestyle and take pride in it.

There are times and places when it's not. Even at the office there are some people who can't work with a clean desk. Their style of thinking and analyzing takes an intuitive approach and their books and papers are strewn all over the place in apparently random piles. They're not random to that messy-desk thinker.

Body memory tells them that stack over on the chair by the door is what they were doing six weeks ago when they found the article on pterosaurs. So they go through that stack first and find it tucked into a book on mammals because they needed to mark something else. Replace the bookmark, retrieve article, cite it, seamlessly return to the project.

Where organization comes in is when collaborators need to find that article. You can't use a personal organization scheme if someone you don't know needs to find what you researched fast. That means you have to stop what you're doing to give directions anytime anyone else on the project needs something.

So the impersonal culture of business does work for some situations and doesn't in others, it emerges from the needs of some jobs. Not all those needs are ethical, the need for middle management to avoid responsibility is well served by "it's just policy, nothing personal."

It gets mindlessly carried over into the rest of life. People with messy-desk organization for things they do at home, like hobbies, wind up feeling ashamed of it and beat themselves up for being unprofessional when they are off duty and don't have to be professional.

When the point of a hobby or avocation is being able to just relax and do things your way, not have to answer to a group or a supervisor, why would it matter if your miniatures paints are lined up by color or by when you purchased them? When you're reading magazines for fun, sorting by "the ones with articles you want to reread" across a dozen different topics makes more sense than by title and year. When you're using your iPad, it makes more sense to organize or not by what makes you happy.

Professionalism can be taken way too far. One of the biggest problems people face today is endemic overwork without enough time to have a personal life. The work-life balance is skewed all the way towards work and people who are nowhere near "desperation" economically still live as if they are. Others don't seem desperate but the amount of debt they carry means they can never slow down. Then some moralist comes along blatting about divorce rates and tries to make them feel bad about the real consequences of hard choices too many people are stuck with.

It's not something easy to do, sorting your life out to have room for both work and play. It's one of the hardest situations when work is as enjoyable as play. I've had to fight myself to let myself relax and just enjoy this new game at the pace that I can and do enjoy new games, because I only succeeded at anything in life by single minded stubborn concentration to the exclusion of anything else.

But that just makes me a canary in a coal mine. People with more physical resources can lose that great health over the long run by neglecting themselves. I know now that I need to keep a good balance even if I have to do odd runarounds to make it happen. That I need to live by the calendar, not the clock, that's my body's pace. The only job I ever wanted is the only one I'm physically capable of doing in a sustainable long term way.

It gets a little scary to look at it that way. But also encouraging, especially when I look at all the effort I put into all the other things I tried to make a living at. Doing that much writing is going to make it work. Practice improves skill and demonstrably did. Fortunately most of the work isn't social enough to require much professionalism. For me it just means making deadlines or recognizing that I won't soon enough to deal with the situation and warn those who are waiting.

I don't do chain letters. When I got one from a good friend who thought it might move me, I did not pass it on. It had the usual chain letter thing at the end, send it to five of their friends to make their day. The story didn't move me to tears and make me want to join a church. It scared me.

There's this person probably living in a middle class house, probably never been financially strapped beyond running out of pocket money and outgrew that. The one and only time in her life that she helped out homeless men with their breakfast floored her. She'd never actually done anything like that before. Then when she does, she gives them a sermon. If they were Christian, that's great, it takes the edge off it being patronizing when she credits God for it.

But if they're not, it's something they smile and put up with and lie through their teeth to get a meal. And she thinks it's so wonderful and rare that she's got to turn it into a chain letter. Is she actually going to start making a habit of it?

Is she making such an enormous sacrifice by smiling at people who smell bad because they don't have access to a shower? She could have invited them over to let them shower, put their clothes through the washing machine, hired them for work around the house.

Real generosity would've been "I've got a basement that really needs sorting and cleaning out. I'll give you $10 an hour and you can get first pick on the yard sale items if you take the job. It's sweaty work, so if you want, you can use the shower and washing machine while you're over here."

The greatest gift you can give a homeless man is work. They are driven by the same work ethic as most Americans and the custom of "blame the victim" runs so deep that they get shamed all the time. The reactions of everyone in McDonalds in the story was typical, they stared at the letter writer in shock and the homeless men in disgust.

The letter writer, having given them one meal rambles off into telling the world about how very very Christian she is and show off. She got her money's worth for those breakfasts. For the price of holding her nose and remembering a religious custom she can now establish herself as a Good Person to thousands of people she doesn't know, friends of friends of friends.

There isn't even a call to action to do the same thing. The call to action is to pass on the chain letter, read about it and turn Christian. This is the flavor that makes Christian Brand Charity such a humiliating process. Oh, and they were obviously white homeless men. She didn't react that way to the scary black homeless men, if they even dared to come into that McDonalds.

For me it's every day. If I'm not broke, whenever I see a homeless person in my neighborhood I share a buck or so, sometimes more if I'm flush. I've skipped my snack because an old black man in a wheelchair asked if I had any change. "No, but I've got a dollar." I get out my wallet and give him a dollar. I don't stop at the Paradise because it was budgeted for my snack. I know that this is my turn, I'm paying it forward. I grin at him and say "I been there, I've only been on Social Security the past five years."

Sometimes they thank God. I smile like a Unitarian and don't preach at them that I'm doing it for Goddess or as a secular humanist. They've got enough troubles without a lecture about religion. I don't lecture anyone on that because it's their lives and their soul. I don't know what religion means to them, I could be spitting on their lifeline if I do. I only know what it means to me and what it feels like to endure religious spam when I'm starving.

Instead I just ask how they're doing, wish them luck, if I've got time (and I usually do) open up a conversation. Give them a break and some real social contact. Some of the people panhandling in my city aren't even homeless. They live on benefits, can't quite make ends meet and pick up that little extra that lets them eat all month instead of just when the check comes in. Others are so isolated living in SRO housing that panhandling becomes a way to meet people and a reason to get out of their rooms.

Sometimes they talk to me about life, about benefits or about how San Francisco was so awesome in the sixties and the seventies. They've been here all along and they fall through the cracks. There's nowhere to go if they're on general assistance or if they're waiting for Social Security or waiting for a pension.

They see where I live and tell me where the food banks are. We're all the same community. The generosity of the blue eyed man in the story toward his mentally impaired companion is common. That's like me and my neighbors in the SRO. Occasionally someone knocks on my door and asks if I have any food. I'll share, because I've gotten good enough at shopping and budgeting to have enough bulk stuff around I could spare something for them.

Then sometimes I'll meet someone in the hall asking "Do you want a loaf of bread?" Or "I've got some chicken in my room, got it from Meals on Wheels, you want it?" My neighbors feed me too. It's reciprocal. I've been deeply grateful since there do come times when the check is a bit too far away and I don't have anything in my room that doesn't need cooking.

I don't think the story means nice guys don't win or that empathy keeps you out of the upper crust. I think it's that people with empathy handle homelessness better and find it easier to survive the streets. The mean ones get in fights and get themselves in jail. Loners crawl off and have a much harder time of it because they aren't getting help from the street.

Or they drink and keep using the alcohol-addiction resources to get along.

In shelters the mean ones turn up but the guys with signs asking for work or food are usually the more sociable and friendly people who had hard luck. That letter writer was so shocked at the blue eyed man's generosity. It doesn't fit the profile. It's not what she expected for someone who doesn't have money to have e heart. Bad things do happen to good people.

I guess maybe that's why the story makes an impact on the socially sheltered. Maybe that was its point. "OMG someone who doesn't bathe or work actually cares about someone else. Maybe that's why he's not working, he looks after the mentally impaired guy."

What he needs is a place to crash that doesn't treat him like a juvenile delinquent. Work that he can do in emergencies and get paid for so that he's still got his self respect and doesn't get looked down on by insulated middle class people. Open markets where he can sell stuff he scrounges or gets given. Co-ops where he can own his work.

My city is of two minds about homeless people. We have the same divide on that as the rest of the country. Wealthy community developers gentrify old quaint low income neighborhoods and introduce Sit-Lie laws - you can't sit down on Market Street. Oh but I'll bet that some exhausted tourist who has money and sits down on the street because she's got a disability gets a different explanation than a confused local senior who can't stay on his feet long enough.

SF does a lot of things right. The Sit-Lie law is a blotch on our civic honor. It runs against everything we stand for.

Currently a new program is being started, where panhandlers are offered the chance to participate with animal shelters in a dog training program. They get $50-$75 a week, the supplemental money they need to survive on benefits. The dogs are company and they're allowed to adopt the animal if they don't want to give it up. Walking the dogs serves the same purpose of getting out onto the street and meeting people, socializing and having something to do.

So the dog program is a good thing, but Sit-Lie has got to go. Other city programs need to come in to really get the homeless off the streets and create livable, low-income housing and emergency housing for no-income people. I've been no-income people more years than I had SSI, so I know that's its own terrible gap. It's too easy to die waiting for SSI if you don't have supportive family who can afford to take you in or friends willing to let you crash.

I reviewed Diablo III last time. It's still that immersive. I've got my barbarian character up to 20th level roaming the desert. He's stalled at a boss I haven't figured out how to kill, so I'm bouncing around bringing the other nine characters up to the same level and getting very familiar with Act I.

The only down side is that with the game hosted on their server, when they do maintenance I can't play. I won't get the game back till 1pm today. Also, because they're hosting it on their server, I can't do what I still do with Diablo 2 and start new characters any time I feel like playing the really easy bits at the beginning. I'd have to delete characters to make room for the goof-off ones.

Also, back in the day when I played on BattleNet and started characters to play in shared games, they get deleted if I don't play for six months. That could get seriously annoying over time. I go for months without playing and then skim through all the old character list basically deciding if I'm going to play in Nightmare with a past winner, or which of the acts I want to poke into with which character type.

I come back to "abandoned" characters sometimes after years. So there's good reason to keep Diablo 2 loaded on the machine as well.

I guess nothing's perfect. It's just frustrating the servers are down, that's all. I'm sure I'll get creative again in a few days, don't know how long it'll take but there will come a point it's not all fresh and exciting.

The book is actually ready for Nonny. It just needs one more read-through to filter one more time for name changes and goofs and prose polishing. I finished the major changes before even installing the game so I don't feel bad about the time I'm putting into it now. This is very much an earned vacation!

I've also been doing a lot of deep thinking, getting myself sorted out finally. Now that I'm here in San Francisco it became safer to get a therapist to work through my PTSD issues. I have quite a few of them. Call it 50 years of continuous trauma before I got surgery including half the surgery and its recovery.

Julie is fantastic. She's a strong, butch woman with short iron-gray hair and a big wide smile. She understands about the physical issues. I've got three major filters for therapists, if they don't Get It about any of the three I have serious problems.

1) Yes, I am physically disabled. All of my body language is distorted by my crooked spine and mismatched different sized on left and right skeleton. I can read body language well enough but I've been told by some knowledgeable people that my physical symptoms can look like the side effects of long term dependency on antipsychotic medication. Using the power chair to get to appointments helped with communicating this.

2) I'm transgendered. Therapists not familiar and comfortable with transgender don't understand that I'm male. They project a ton of reactions and feelings and thoughts on me that have never been there. They assume these things and ignore, discount or discourage anything real in my reactions. This kind of therapist is the worst, because they're treating my better qualities as flaws and ignoring my problems in favor of made-up ones. At best I wind up having to spend the entire course of therapy educating the therapist instead of working on my problems.

3) Religious outlook and moral values. I'm pagan. I do not have Christian values or even many relict Christian values. I've drawn my worldview from a wide variety of different cultures and thrown out most of Christianity's ideas of right and wrong. There are a few areas of overlap. Real basic ones - murder and theft are wrong in that order, rather than the other order as some conservatives seem to expect.

There's huge cultural barriers with a therapist who doesn't understand my coherent, solid world view. I don't feel shame or guilt about things that I don't think of as wrong, like having had a wild youth. I'm rather proud of the fact that my broad, varied, experimental sexual youth was also sensibly mostly safe-sex and I have lived by my sexual ethics. They bear no relation to the Christian ideal of monogamy marriage-and-kids.

I don't have a lot of shame over a lot of things and don't have the Original Sin viewpoint that people are inherently evil unless some church whips them into being moral. For a long time I didn't even call it morals, I drew a semantic line between Ethics and Morals because my ethics personal. I decided them and I stick to them and adapt them as necessary when those sticky decisions of right and wrong come up in the world or my consciousness gets raised. Morality I thought of as the hypocritical consensus of society, a corrupt thing that could not be trusted to guide decisions of right and wrong in a shattered, dysfunctional culture.

Now that I'm in San Francisco, I'll go ahead and call it morality. My ideas of right and wrong are pretty close to those of my city. I'm part of the community here in ways I never was back in other cities and places I lived in. One of the sad things about having had so many bad therapists, many of them causing immense damage, is that none of them - not even the two previous good ones, ever said what Kitten did.

"Why don't you go ahead and move back to San Francisco even if it costs more to live there?"

Oh, that is a fourth filter I ran into with therapists.

4) Poverty. There are a lot of therapists who may even get past the first three filters and cannot grasp how far down the economic spectrum a white person can slide between physical health issues and discrimination. They don't get it. They assume I could just go out and get a job, that I should want to go out and get a job, that I've got middle class lifestyle assumptions the same as theirs. They have a good job so they don't understand what happens when other necessities are balanced against rent.

They suggest things I can't afford and think that it's a psychological problem if I have financial limits. They can't imagine how I could live in the ways that I do and survive the things I've survived and don't always respect that.

There are so many critical areas of miscommunication that go on with therapists that it's vital to find one that understands your context. A bad therapist does much more harm than good.

Time and again I wound up seeing therapists with the intent of dealing with old issues, only to start going into a slow decline because that therapist's blind spots sap my morale. When a therapist is steering you in the wrong direction for your life, it can take weeks or even months to figure out that's what's going wrong. When it's going right, it's sometimes painful as I dig into areas I'd rather not deal with and face sides of myself that I don't like. It's easy to mistake the friction of cultural conflicts for that kind of pain and keep going way farther into bad therapy than I should.

As a child it wasn't voluntary. There was literally nothing I could do but resist and keep holding my identity boundaries against the assault of trained adults with an agenda that went against my health and my real needs. Later on, I tried repeatedly to find good ones on my own because my life's been that hard all along - and so few of them got it, got any of it.

Betsy was a gay-friendly marriage counselor in Chicago, not a psychologist or psychiatrist. She was good at it and helped prepare me for breaking up with my ex - she saw the relationship was over years before I let go. I was afraid to lose him because he was the only human being in my intimate circle at the time. I had friends and acquaintances but no family or people as close as family except him.

Roland was a therapist I saw in New York throughout the years I was homeless. He was black. It made all the difference to his perceptions of poverty and discrimination that he experienced it himself. He did more than anyone else to help my transition. He helped me sort out how much of my problems were internal, PTSD issues, scars from previous traumas and how much were just current existing traumas in an unlivably rough situation. One of the things he was researching was the specific pressures and adaptations of artistic work.

His view included the idea that introspection tends to turn over and rip apart a lot of the everyday dysfunctions and bad attitudes that most people don't even pay attention to or get hurt by. It makes sense to this day. I can't count the number of people who told me "You think too much" about almost anything. Yet I have to in order to paint or write well. I have to look at what's really there, from many points of view to show them from different characters instead of narrowly from one point of view.

Julie's as good as those two were. I've got high hopes for this. On the list, she's a strong adherent of Integrative Medicine and we will be directly tackling my fibromyalgia symptoms, trying to reduce them and maybe even retrain my autoimmune system to Non-Emergency Health. She shares my idea that one of its causes is just the unreal levels of stress I put up with through the first fifty years of my life.

With her, my goal is to get used to living well in a happy place where I fit in and I'm pretty much in step with the community. I like it here. The things I gave up to be here are mostly things I don't care about in teh first place. Like having a car. I didn't want a car so much as I wanted independence. I didn't want a house so much as I wanted a clean room and a happy cat.

Now she's done the paperwork and my happy cat is a prescription strength, official Emotional Support animal, not a pet but the necessity he is in my life. I rate him on that priority, he eats before I do. Now the city does too and I won't be as limited in my housing choices. She thinks practical like that - she even suggested it before I brought it up as soon as I described my relationship with him. Yes, my cat's in my intimate circle.

So far it's going well. Monday we got into some deep emotional territory, we're starting to get past logistic stuff into the things that need to be dug up and aired out. Most people try to get rid of their dirty laundry. I'm a writer. That means beyond just dealing with it by getting rid of it, I need to get it cleaned up, washed and folded and packed up neatly into the bins of Cool Things To Write About. Not one of the troubles I've faced in life is unique to me, all of them make good story. So I can't forget. Just get grounded into here and now to understand my life is different, those conflicts have diminished to a human scale.

Aw bugger. I just came out to LiveJournal again. I had years ago when I got my surgery but I'd let it lapse as I picked up more readers from my art groups, where I'm not really out.

Oh well.

If you didn't know, now you do. Add that to the list of assorted physical defects I had to struggle with. I was always the guy you know me as, but there were some nightmare years especially in childhood when that looked like a monster because I got stuffed in a dress and people expected me to think and act and feel like a girl. It was as ludicrous as you're imagining.

It was more painful than I can describe. The closest thing that comes to it is that Twilight Zone episode about the man who got shunned and people literally acted like he didn't exist. That's essentially what it was - whatever I said or felt or thought, people ignored that and answered the lines that they thought I'd said. Sometimes helpfully cuing me to what I was supposed to think or feel.

Lot of long stories there, but I had surgery in 2005 and am now legally male and look decent if I was to go swimming or whatever. Still no life partner but I didn't exactly have much opportunity in the past decade and right now I want to get my head together before I look. That way I won't wind up with another dysfunctional relationship. Being single is far better than a bad relationship.