Rorschach Buttons
Sometimes, I think objects work like one giant Rorschach test.
Yesterday, I used a clip from a preview for Peripheral to help my female friends understand when they are viewing my Story on social media they are in essence playing in a simulation as me. In the clip from the tv show, the brother is given a beta VR headset to test but wants his sister to play as his avatar since she is much better at it. In the clip I play, they are counting back from ten, and she is going on as his avatar before I transition into pictures from my life from my POV. I want them to understand as they view, since sometimes I feel their strange reflections are an attempt to interpret 'me.'
In the tv show, the brother is psychically linked to others in his combat squad by a piece of tech called 'haptics.' They can tune these and know how each other is feeling or what they are experiencing. This is a little like trans people, especially those of us who have had the modifications. The mods really fuck them up and not just physically, though, but knowing what each other feels.
Today, the song that I used to accompany the simulation of my POV, "Something is Happening and I May Not Understand But I'm Happy to Stand for the Understanding (Awakening)" by André 3000 from Transa, started playing just as I got in my vehicle. It's a song my mom said sounded like a videogame, and I realized that some force out there was trying to flip the script and pretend like I was the sister Flynn playing as the brother in my life as a virtual reality that is actually the future. It tripped me out for a second - only a second before I recalled that my hands are the same size as the Muslim man's at work - M, then my hands went right back to the way they normally look. They're an artist's hands, but I had imagined them frailer and smaller than they actually are.
It's interesting how people perceive things- as if I had perceived women or the essence of femininity as frailer and smaller than me. This is such a masculine way of viewing.
Today, I got the little "Senorita" cigars by Ashton because they were cheaper and had the most in the pack, and some man said he had not imagined the power of the force, and all I could think is, sure, dude, at least now I'm smoking a woman. It's funny how we must justify things in our heads. I would never buy these cigars normally because of what they are called. They were just good quality and cheaper, and maybe that is what makes me a man.
At home, there are two items in my living room that I find perpetual amusement and irritation with in my living room that always seem to end up in pictures: my broken vacuum and the cat pole my friend bought for Lucy. There really is nowhere to put the vacuum but the trash, yet I think of the Rorschach test, and vacuums and vacuuming make me think of the vacuum process in abortions. It's odd really; I'm not sure how that association came to be in my head. And every time I see Lucy on that cat pole, I'm like, baby kitty, what did daddy tell you about climbing stripper poles! Then, I laugh, and am just happy that she is not tearing up my leather couch.
I think of Getrude Stein's Tender Buttons and her poems on objects and wonder if she laughed when she wrote that lily whites who exhaust noise and surface and dust and dirt any surface for no necessary reason need a catalogue.