Simplicity

Today I finally got off my ass and re-vamped my blog face.  I have been meaning to do it for a long time but until today have never taken the time.  Which is rather lame of me because it took all of five minutes or less.  I wanted to get rid of the explicitly transsexual references and also the ones relating to me being married.  I originally wrote the texts that I have revised last summer when I started this blog.  They fit my mindset back then, and with everything that I have experienced in the last ten months, the words no longer fit.  Back then I was amidst trying to accept my transsexuality and therefore wanted to explicitly write it in text.  Now that I have accepted and feel very comfortable with it, I no longer feel the need to shout it from the mountaintop.  And besides, what I wrote was kinda absurd and more than I actually feel should be there.  Simplicity has its virtues.

I am nursing my upper lip today because I went through an hour of electrolysis on it yesterday.  If there are any would be transwomen reading this, I would like to give some advice relative to hair removal procedures.  Laser treatments are a falsehood in that they are claimed to permanently remove hair.  According to my experience this is not true.  My electrologist lambasted me for having laser treatments during the time I was in the states.  She told me that laser is not permanent and sooner or later the hair grows back colorless and somewhat finer in texture.  Case in point.  Back in early march it took three hours to clear my upper lip, lower lip, and chin.  About four weeks later it took just over an hour to clear the same area.  On Thursday night it took almost an hour and a half to clear my chin and lower lip, and yesterday took just over an hour to clear my lower lip.  In principle, electrolysis successively reduces the amount of hair, so the amount of time to clear a given area should successively decrease.  The only explanation that I can come up with is that I experienced a laser induced dormancy re-growth.  This re-growth is probably influenced by the body’s tendency in summer to dispel the winter induced vitamin D stockpiling.  The dispelling of vitamin D is evidenced by increased hair and nail growth.

I am hoping that all that will grow back has grown back, and electrolysis will only get easier and easier in the future.  I have been working on beard hair removal for almost three years now.  I was very discouraged this week when I came to the realization that the amount of hair has not decreased.  The sheer amount of pain associated with electrolysis, not to mention the time and money, is depressing in and of itself.  I still have hope that someday I can get rid of my razor once and for all.  Shaving my legs and pits I can live with, but shaving my face continually is to me unacceptable.

I went to a biergarten on Wednesday with Fredi, Meck, Walter, Siggy, Gerhard, and Anja.  Anja no longer works with us, but we like to all get together once in a while.  Anja came a bit later than the rest, and she didn’t recognize me at first when she sat down.  Fredi had told her about my change beforehand to prepare her.  At the biergarten the conversation didn’t focus on me at all, but rather on other things and we all had a good time.  I did feel a little self conscious though, as I had a full beard which I have been able to somewhat hide with some makeup tricks I have learned.  I look ok as long as you don’t look too closely.  

I am glad I look now very different than I used to.  I think that most people automatically assume the negative when they think of someone changing their gender, when it comes to appearances.  I am extremely satisfied with the look that I am able to achieve and I feel that I don’t need to obsess over it.  I have found what works for me and I stick with it.  I am also learning how to be flexible when time is at issue.  The thing that takes me the longest is drying my hair.  Showering, facial skin care, shaving, and makeup take the shortest amount of time.  Applying my makeup takes all but ten minutes or less.  I have also learned how to take care of my hair and sleep with it so that I don’t need to wash and style it everyday.  That is really a challenge because of how long it is.  My hair reaches half way down my spine.  I love my hair even though I still have racing stripes on the top of my head, but those will eventually be dealt with.

Thursday at work was an extremely frustrating day.  I was on the verge of tears when I left to go home to prepare for my electrolysis session.  I was so exasperated from work that the pain from the electrolysis didn’t really affect me.  I cried for a while afterwards and decided to go to bed early to put an end to the terrible day.  Work has become so frustrating that I am finding it harder and harder to turn it off when I am outside work.  That depresses me and makes me feel that I need to find a new job.  The whole problem stems from poor management.  I was brought over here again with the specific intent of developing the next generation of a specific type of test stand.  The first generation was designed almost ten years ago and we have not been given the chance to technologically modernize it since.  The design department has always had new ideas, but we have never had a chance outside of a customer contract to further develop the product.  Customer contracts always have a fixed budget and a fixed time schedule.  Those constraints do not allow for development, they only allow time and money to copy the same thing over and over.

The past three years of the development project have been spent in endless meetings discussing market demands and therefore no real design work has taken place.  Me and the other design team members have never been completely free of working on customer projects, and therefore have never been ginven the chance to focus on the development efforts.  Upper management has probably been lied to, or doesn’t want to accept that our immediate managers have decided it was more important for us to work on customer projects.  Therefore upper management thinks we are a group of lazy and unmotivated engineers who have no interest in the future of the product.  The perception is that we do not know how to reduce costs, but the reality is that we have never been given the chance.  A cost analyst was hired some months ago to help us reduce costs, but since I have had no time to work with him, he has decided to do my concept design work on his own.  New ideas and a fresh perspective are good to an extent, but to totally redesign the wheel is not going to work.  Most of his ideas are ideas that we have shown him and he has bastardized them to the point where they will not work at all.  And he presents them as his own ideas.  Some of the things he is proposing we have already tried or abandoned because we determined they won’t physically work.

My frustration is derived from this endless confrontation with someone who has become familiar with the product within the last six months and the team that has on average over ten years experience with the product.  We have been judged on evidence that doesn’t exist yet.  We are constantly told that we did a shitty job even before we have done the job.  I do not make the decision as to what I work on, that is what I have managers for.  I am there to make design decisions and design things.  A meeting is scheduled with the company president on this coming Tuesday for three hours with no agenda.  I am assuming that we will be further told what idiots we are and that we need to reduce costs on something we haven’t been given the chance to design yet.  I think I will prepare a little ditty of my own, a bomb of sorts to try to clear the air.  People from outside now have become a part of the team and I resent the false impression they have been given by management.  I am at the point where I don’t care if I am fired or not, so I have nothing to lose.  I aim to take ten minutes to explain my position and how I see the non-progress of the development project.  I feel that I must or I will go crazy.