shots from da island

I said I'd post pics from the HI trip here, and although I don't think I'm accountable to any gentle readers (because there aren't any), I am true to my word.

hibiscus flowers, waimea beach park

cannonball tree, waimea beach park

sunset at sunset beach

house finch, uss arizona memorial

hang gliding base, sandy beach

roadside stop, north shore

friends of malaekahana

wardrobe malfunction

When I was a very little girl, I was all about the dresses.  I only vaguely remember this phase, as I think it stopped in kindergarten or first grade: as my mom tells it, I came home from school one day very upset because the other kids could see my underwear while I was hanging upside down on the playground.  I don't recall that particular event, but I do recall the neighbor girl and boy distracting me on the top of the jungle gym, observing that I was as tall standing atop it as the nearest young tree.  While I paused, enchanted, she and the neighbor boy took the opportunity to look up my skirt.

I was a naked kid, and didn't feel any shame in that, but I guess being seen in one's underwear is less deliberate and therefore more embarrassing?  Or, perhaps more likely, I was ashamed at having been duped.  (They also once took me on a bike ride, further from home than I was allowed to go, and then all raced off and left me behind, straggling and pushing hard on the pedals while they all changed gears and climbed the hill on their powerful big-kid legs.  I was ashamed then, too, because I thought they wanted me to hang out with them, and now I was all by myself and lost, couldn't figure out how to get home.)  I don't think I learned modesty from the incident, because I remember being told gently at age 8 or 9 that from then on, pants and a shirt were required at the dinner table.  Sitting on the woven bar stools sans vetements left red waffle-patterns on one's sitting parts.  To this day I'm happy to change into my swimsuit on the beach, to prevent the bikini knot from digging into my spine on the drive there.

I never got back into dresses, though.  I'll put one on for a special event, but pack along a change of clothes because I really feel unnatural with my knees constantly pressed together, all feminine-like.  I think it strains my hips and my mental health.  The girls that wear cute little sundresses to work amaze me -- you're really comfortable, sitting there in that thing all day?  With your ankles daintily crossed?  Yeesh.  How do you drive in those four-inch heels?  Don't get me wrong, you look good enough to eat, but that kind of an outfit is just too high-maintenance for me.  I miss that brief grunge trend in the 90s when it was totally acceptable to wear a sundress over your skater jeans.

somebody told me that you've got a girlfriend who looks like a boyfriend that i had in february of last year

In my hateful job, working for the man, we collect demographic information about patients, which is entered into an electronic disease database.  The program identifies some common logic errors during the data entry process, to cut down on the amount of quality control procedures that have to be done later.  In addition, some of the data on the form is drawn from the client's record in the database system.  The database system collects the patient's gender, and the form uses that response to autopopulate the patient's sex at birth.

In case you haven't heard, it's the fucking millennium, and gender and sex are not the same thing. (In case the gentle reader needs clarification, sex is a biological characteristic, whereas gender is a social identification, and doesn't necessarily align with the biological sex.)  And a public agency should know that, even if the general populace is unaware.  I went on a mission when the autopopulation was introduced to try to correct the mistake, but everyone agreed that it was an unimportant distinction.

So fast-forward to now, and it's my job to make sure data are entered completely and accurately into the system.  Some of them I enter myself, and those are no problem: I enter "unknown" for the gender and fill out the biological sex at birth according to the form.  I've been doing it for months now.  It's also part of my job to assist others entering data, and they seem to be treating gender as sex, appreciating the auto-population feature.  This makes me GRRRRR, but no one listens to me so who cares?  And then my boss asks me how I've been dealing with this issue, and I told her, and added "that's what I'd tell anybody who asked me about it, too.  Because I'm not permitted to make any assumptions about patient data, and gender is not included on the form."  I'm expecting to be read the riot act, because she likes to do that to me.  But sometimes she surprises me, as when she responded, "Good answer."  Hmm.

I'm completely ashamed of the inner workings of this office and its cost to the taxpayers.  It's perfectly obvious to me why the government is out of money...and it's only tangentially related to gender vs. sex, but sometimes one small example of idiocy opens a window to view the rest of the problem.

everyone loves boobies

As a young child, I was under the impression that when female humans reached adulthood, they were endowed with boobs.  It was a categorical endowment: all boobs were created equal.  I can only assume this came from a lack of fixation on them, or perhaps an inability to adequately compare and contrast different sets (even within my own extended family, there is quite a variety in terms of asset allocation).  I was aware -- at least peripherally -- that women who were overweight were also heftier on top, but I concluded that each had received her intended allotment and then distributed an insulating layer equitably about her entire frame.

The categorial boobs illusion didn't persist into adolescence, but I was disappointed anyway.  My mom claims she's still waiting for hers, or sometimes that her sister stood in line twice and that's why she missed out.  When I was about ten years old, she asked me if I wanted to go shopping for bras, and I was horrified.  If I were to show up at school in a bra, the other kids would think I thought I had boobs!  I was all knees and elbows, and a head taller than 98% of my classmates (no, seriously, I'm not exaggerating at all), and definitely had no need for supportive underwear.  But, wait!  The other girls were starting to wear bras.  Clearly this was some sort of requirement.  I predicted a situation like the one at the choir concert where S & B were talking about shaving legs and she made fun of him for not knowing that girls shave in an upward motion, not a downward motion.  Seriously, who doesn't know that?  Oh, my god, I didn't know that!  Obviously I should've started shaving my legs long ago!  (To this day, I have such fine blonde hair on my legs that no one can tell if I've shaved them or not except in direct sunlight.)  So, clearly, I need to start wearing a bra in case there are things only bra-wearers know about bra-wearing.  Mom brought home some training bras and I started test-driving.  I had very rigid criteria: no part of the bra must be perceivable through or around my shirt, so that no one would suspect that I was wearing one, and therefore conclude that I thought I had boobs.  Spaghetti strap tank tops were definitely out, as were white t-shirts, since I wasn't aware of the nude-colored bra strategy for concealment.  See, there are things only bra-wearers know about bra-wearing!

My mother apparently interpreted my fear of discovery as modesty.  Later in my teenage years -- after I developed something approaching a bustline -- she ruefully remembered my elementary-school chastity.  By that point, I couldn't figure out what was such a big deal about visible bra straps.  I wasn't parading around the "secret" parts of my lingerie, it was just that spaghetti strap tank tops were so very fantastic.  Besides, let's examine the work-arounds: 1) strapless bras: those bitches do not stay put no matter what size bust a girl's sporting, 2) pins: are likely to produce injury, complicate wardrobe changes, and only hide the portion of the strap directly adjacent to the pin, 3) shiny clear plastic straps that actually attract attention to one's effort to hide her functional undergarment from view.

I spent an anxious few years waiting for my boobs to make their appearance.  I even bought a padded bikini top one year, which boosted my poolside confidence but became a spongy dripping mess in the water.  Eventually I realized there are many benefits to being small-busted: sports are less painful, lingerie costs a smaller fortune, cute clothes fit better, archery and billiards shots are more easily executed, and interlocutors maintain better eye contact.  I still, however, sometimes have trouble signalling the bartender, and I'm obligated to store my cell phone and currency in my pocket.  That seems appropriate, anyway, especially given what I hear about cleavage sweat.