Reentry

I'm sitting in an incredibly weirdly branded coffee shop/AT&T store in Cap Hill, listening to the music on my laptop because AT&T's open wifi doesn't quite have the gumption to allow me youtube. I haven't listened to the music on my laptop since at least 2018 because it's ridiculous. There's maybe three decent albums on here. There's at least 100+ albums total.

Because it's Monday, most adult humans here are at a job, going to a job, or WFCS (Working From Coffee Shop). I have carefully curated the worst 4/10 schedule I could have ever designed at my job, which is essentially data entry in pet insurance, and I have Mondays off, which means that I frequently get the benefits of nearly completely quiet coffeeshops, even in Seattle.

there's an ugly block of apartments across the street that also hosts a lone black and white pigeon, who keeps flying back and forth across the street to what I can only assume is its nest in the concrete chunk above the door.

I've been sitting here trying to figure out what constitutes a proper introduction post.

My previous self managed to keep up with blogging for 5 years, and then stopped, and I'm not hugely confident that I'll be able to keep up with blogging for that extent of time, but that's fine.

They were, in many respects, a totally different person. It's important to think about what they did and thought and said with compassion towards myself, and it's important to me to remember that they were me - but they were me in 2010. People change, and not nearly in the ways you expect them to.

So, five years later, diary? or should we go for the full decade?

Ten years ago I was in high school. Not even a real person yet. Less said, the better. high intensity pressure only turns you into a diamond if you start out as coal first.
I graduated, worked at a factory, took a chaotic and confused path through college, graduated with a major in psych, went to americorps nccc, was both intensely depressed and dysphoric for most of that time. realized I was trans, got diagnosed with both anxiety and global hypermobility, moved to Seattle, changed my name. Worked on not being quite as sad. In college I got published in a small peer-reviewed spec fic anthology, in seattle I got an essay published in a book you can even buy on amazon. Somewhere in there, I stopped writing this blog. I think in October 2015 I was halfway through NCCC.

K Moss feels, in many ways, like a younger sibling. Maybe even a younger sister. I can see the ways that they became me, and I can see similar paths, similar phrasing. But I think in many ways we've lost each other. Maybe in twenty years I'll read this and have that same sort of disconnect, a kind of temporal Venn's Diagram.

Today, I'm Moss. I'm 27. I've made art and stories. I live in Seattle. I'm trying to stop apologizing and doing a generally bad job. I'm in love with a fantastically weird man and with pigeons, on slightly different levels of intensity. I'm trying to understand passion, and I'm trying to develop hobbies (bead lizards? redesigning a studio apartment to be functional? tiny tiny books?). I'm trying to pay attention to myself more, and I'm trying very unsuccessfully to grow a moustache. I'm going to post stories and essays here, along with more personal rambles, and I'll include a link to my gofundme (in case you'd like to help me out with top surgery) and to my other projects.

Who were you even
what did you think about the world

Letting it stand

5 years after the last post on here
10 years after the first post on here

It's surreal.

I'd forgotten about this blog. I'd come across my old email account, or the word "pique", and think "Oh yeah, remember your old blog? Wonder if it's still up."

Well, I guess so.

I've been working on the site set up for a wordpress blog, but the learning curve is a bit too intense when all I really want is to be able to type whatever comes into my head in a way that isn't on facebook or tumblr (so, in a way that isn't too reliant on other people's feedback). I don't need a central webpage, I just want a text box.

So I guess I've come back here.

I think my plan is going to be to see if I can share this blog between two users: K Moss and Mossifer (name pending). K Moss will be the legacy poster here. It's weird to see all of their posts and thoughts up, but I don't think I'm going to delete any of it. It's important to me to see this sort of history that I have with myself, regardless of how frequently ignorant or biased I was, as a younger person. This will be the last post that they make, though, barring tech issues.

Mossifer will be me, the same person 5 years later.
Man, that's weird.

I guess it calls for an introductory post? A re-introductory post? I'm unsure of the semantics here.

Let us be friends again, internet.

Depressed-You is an Idiot

I'm going to say first that if you have depression, and you think talking about it will be triggering, then stop. And go here instead.
Or here.  

For the past few years, I've been having issues with depression.
Apathy and insomnia is the worst of it lately, but it's all bad.
I like to say I'm a writer, but I can barely explain what depression feels like, because you read books about it and look at web md's symptom pages (warning, going to web md's symptom checker may cause you to think you have leukemia), and you still can't quite grasp it.

But, okay. Here's my attempt at explaining depression - for me, at any rate.  For those of you who already know, skip down a few paragraphs.  Go ahead.  That's where I'm talking about how I'm dealing with it.  Shoo.

I find it easiest to compare depression to a migraine, because I've had my fair share of them (that's a lie.  The only "fair share" of migraines a person can have is none.  I have had way too many migraines.) and it's easier to explain a migraine (ow, ow, my brain is broken and I can't see) than it is to explain depression (ow, ow, my brain is broken and I can't see because I've been crying for the past week).  For one, it's easier to be funny.  You can be more open about migraines, because we don't have the same stigmas about physical pain than we do about emotional pain.  With depression, I feel like I can't be as funny about it because while I can compare a migraine to evil little gremlins driving spikes into your brain while playing *shudders* country music, I can't say the same thing about depression without sounding, ha ha, crazy.

Depression is like having a migraine for three weeks months years and not having any Excedrin.  Straight up.  Sometimes you're listening to music that you like and the migraine goes away for a few hours, or you're talking with people that you actually like and you forget that your head hurts.  But the one surety for those entire three weeks is that it will come back.  

Depression is like all of those scenes in horror movies where the heroine is bashing away at the villain with the baseball bat screaming "Why won't you die?"  And then the villain stays around for the next 8 terrible sequels.  

The important thing to know about depression is that sometimes it does go away, and sometimes, with help, it stays away.  But in my experience, it comes back.  And sometimes it creeps up on you, so that you don't realize you have depression until you're lying on your friend's couch staring at the wall crying.  And then you can talk about it, because depressed-you isn't the same as you-you, and you-you has the ability to talk about what's wrong.  Depressed-you is a proud idiot with a mental illness.  Don't Listen to her.  

Here's the part where I talk about what I do.  What I've been doing.  Those of you who skipped down, welcome back to the party.  The depression party.  We have black balloons, but our confetti is made out of glitter, which is the prettiest confetti, and we stay up all night because when we go to sleep we have really bad dreams.

What I do is I figure out what triggers me.  And I avoid it.  I tell my closest friends that I have issues and we work on it.  Together.  Community is the thing that helps me the most, honestly.  Lately I've been working on a blog where I talk about the sort of things I avoid talking about here.  It's depression-me's blog.  Even though I'm fairly sure no one reads it, I like thinking that when I'm older, and better, (and famous and popular and rich, because this is my fantasy, dammit) maybe some kid will hear me reference that blog, and look it up, and maybe they'll read it and think, "Dayum.  If this lady is so effed up, and ended up so cool, then... I guess there's hope for me."

That's what helps.  That's what keeps me going.  I don't want to change the world.  Just someone in it.  I make goals for myself.  I want to be at my cousin's graduation.  I want to write a book.  And one day I want to read the last book of the Kingkiller Chronicles by Patrick Rothfuss.    And it's going to be awesome.

Stop Killing Our Future

I was talking to a friend about Ron Paul, because he(the friend) is now a delegate for 2000 people (be afraid. be very afraid).

He said an interesting thing in passing, and he probably had no idea that I'd seize upon that stray comment, so don't blame him for this rant. 

Ok. So he and his friend were talking to the senator being elected (Sorum.) and mentioned that he was pretty cool – a stand up guy – but also mentioned that he (Sorum) didn’t really pay all that much attention to a “couple of kids” until he realized that they were in charge of 2000 votes. That is - until he figured out they had actual power and influence upon his position.


And okay. I get the popular preconception of the teenage years being stupid and hormonal and not political, but come on. I’m nineteen. I’m in TPS (Ten Percent Society), FUND (Freethinkers of UND), Honors, VP of CrWC (Creative Writing Club) , SPILL (Supporting Peers in Laidback Listening), volunteering to help with an engineering outreach program next week, and I’m working with the Nonprofit Group on campus. I play D&D and read Howard Zinn and Genome for fun. I’ve been quoted in our newspaper twice – once on CrWC, once on the Interfaith Fair. I wrote a letter to the editor when I was twelve, asking for a horoscope designed for kids. I know self defense, I write - a lot, and I have a job offer from the multicultural center here. I’m undecided, yeah, but I know damn near every building on this campus, which lunch room’s the best for food (Terrace), seating (squires), quick (MarketPlace), and always open (Wilkerson). I’m a voter. I’m eligible to join the military. I critique my friends’ papers and stories, and I’m almost always available to give advice. I pay taxes. I am, for all intents and purposes, an adult, and so are most of my friends. You want to know the best thing about coming to college? It was the fact that, for once, my professors actually wanted to hear me talk. They wanted to hear me think.


College is the first place where I have realized that some of the things I’m saying are something new and might be right. College is the first place where I have realized that some of the things I’m doing are right.

Experience shouldn’t count for so damn much unless you constantly use that experience. I’m probably not going to argue with Hawking about Physics, or King about writing horror. But I know that I know more about certain ideas than some of my older colleagues, and I will not back down from them just because they have been alive longer than I have. 


Once upon a time, length of life used to mean that you were more evolved – better at survival, and not getting killed. But that was before medical advances and technology and better hygiene. In 21st century America, being older than someone else means that either your genes haven’t yet missed something important while self-replicating, or your doctor is good.

This is a serious problem in America, where kids are killing themselves because it’s the only way to get people to listen. When did teen suicide become the new way of expressing yourself? It took two years and nine teen suicides for Bachmann’s home district to lift the “No Homo Promo” Policy. Nine. 

We are killing our future.

Kids are smarter than you think, but they believe adults. What you tell them impacts their beliefs, their choices, their future. And when you tell them that the only way for them to get your attention is by killing themselves, they will listen to you very well.


I don’t have a solid solution. I hope someone comes up with one soon. But I think it’s pretty clear that we need one soon. The issue isn’t so small as LGBT bullying, or the religious diehards at my school who think it's funny to write that the Freethinker group here is going to hell. And yeah, that ticks me off. But these are symptoms of a larger problem.


The issue is the fact that no one is listening to the kids. “A penny for my thoughts, oh no, I'll sell 'em for a dollar/They're worth so much more after I'm a goner/And maybe then you'll hear the words I been singin'/Funny when you're dead how people start listenin'” goes the song – and it’s true. It has become a case of too little, too late – especially for the nine casualties of the “No Homo Promo” policy.


We need to stop using children as our weapons in a war of miscommunications and bad policy.


You need to respect kids.


Because we're more powerful than you think. And once we realize that, we won't be the future.

We'll be the present.

Midnight Ramblings

It's midnight. Or whatever.
I'm sitting on the blue fluffy thing that takes up much of the corner of my floor. The lights are dim; I've only got one on. My door is closed, so I keep sneaking uneasy glances at it out of the corner of my eye; something I'm not fully aware of. It's a little cold, but I can't quite justify getting up to put on a sweatshirt, or pajamas.
My room's kind of a mess. My roommate and I just reorganized it, and so there's an abandoned chair in the center of the room and the floor is littered with a small, neat pile of dust, candy wrappers, bottle caps and broken pencils. My roommate's bed is empty; she's working, or rather at her family's house, asleep by this time of the night.
The halls are dimly lit and largely empty. There are no voices, no running. Just the occasional noises from upstairs and the opening and closing of the heavy doors at the ends of the halls betray the fact that there are people in the building. It isn't total silence; there's a clock ticking in the corner of the room, and my computer is humming softly; but it's the closest to ambient noise I'm going to get in a college dorm room.
My keyboard pauses, then clicks softly as the refrigerator (small, mildly battered, and close to my seat) kicks in with a heavy whir.
I suppose I've been doing some thinking.
I'd like to find a major. You can't really graduate with a degree in Undecided, or even Facebook. My past opinions on majors, thus far, have been: Civil Engineering, English, History, Computer Science, Criminal Justice, Humanities, Psychology, Creative Writing, Anthropology and Religion. And even though I know it's not possible, it would be lovely if I could just apprentice myself to someone, or if I could take a pilgrimage out to a desert to speak to the Oracle, who would tell me what I'm fated to be. I'd like someone to tell me what to do, and at the same time, I'd hate it with a passion.
An apprenticeship would be nice, though. It seems like a very clean transition to adulthood. Apprentice to Journeyman, complete a masterwork, become a Master, take an apprentice. Cycle.
I suppose I'm mostly just sick of being treated like a child. I'd like a clean cut to adulthood, a public ceremony accepted by society, that people can look at and say, "Oh, they've got their journeyman papers. Okay."
Too many laws and conventions are in place in our Great Country that are targeted solely at age groups. And that's all very well and good, I'm sure, if all people were to mature at the same rate.
But I know people who have passports, un-limited driver's licenses, insurance, cars, houses...and who I would not trust with my brother's pet cat. Likewise, I know people who are in high school who shouldn't have to live with their parents anymore because of the simple fact that they've already surpassed them in taking care of themselves. This isn't always the case. But it is often enough to invalidate the weight placed upon age in our society.
And so I'm sick of not quite being sure of my status, when some people ask me for advice and some people feel obligated to force it on me, when some people listen to my words and hear what I have to say and some people ignore my words as "just another teenager." Wisdom comes with experience, but experience bears only a superficial connection to age.
To that effect, I'm not returning home this summer. I'm not working at my dad's work. I'm not living in the house that, every time I step through the threshold, miraculously transforms me into a much younger person. I'm staying up here, getting my own job, and living on my terms (which aren't likely to be that radically changed from the present.) It's partially an effort for independence, partially my own attempt at journeyman's papers (though when I moved 700 miles away, I feel I could have passed journeyman then) and also partially an experiment. Do I need to return home in order to validate my independence?
I'm giving up hills and trees for this. I'm giving up some friends and some Italian cheese.
But I'm doing it anyway, because this will be, in my opinion, my test for journeyman. And when I pass it, nothing will really change on the outside. But I'll get a hella more confident in my adult status.