I can't help it.  I know I've got to be at work at ten tomorrow morning, but I can't seem to help myself from staying up all night.  After all, the big swap happened some time between 11pm of 18 July  and 4am the next morning a year ago, and some irrational part of my brain expects something to happen exactly one year later.  Of course, "exactly one year later" would have been something like eighteen hours ago, when you consider that this is a leap year and the actual solar year is about 365.25 days long.  But we human beings get arbitrary time periods into our heads.

So I'm fiddling around, reading my first posts from a year ago.  Or, if you want to get technical, the original Martin Hartle's last posts and my first ones.  It actually puts things in a kind of perspective to go back and read them.  I kind of wish "I" had started blogging earlier, so that I'd have more of a record of my first life.  Memory isn't just a videotape of one's life, it's a whole bunch of constantly updated cross-references, and after a year, many of my memories of being a man have sort of become about how it was different from who I am now.  I'm already starting to forget how alien my body felt at first, or how mortifying people treating me like a girl seemed; I read or think about that stuff and it's like "wow, you were silly back then".

Now?  I'm sort of liking my life.  Doug took me out to a club on Friday.  I was comfortable, wearing tight and low-cut stuff that showed off my boobs and legs, and managing my heels without any trouble even after I had a couple drinks in me.  Heck, I was able to handle my alcohol intake because I know my capacity now.  I could pace myself until about eleven, when we headed back to Doug's place.

Lawyers make good money.  I doubt the nice apartment Nat alluded to out in Seattle is quite as nice as the one where Doug lives.  No roommate, but you could rent it as a two-bedroom because he uses one as a study/home office.  There's a couch in there that folds out to a bed if someone needs to crash for a bit.

Not that I was having any of that.  We were both loose - though not quite loose enough to forget the condom; I'm not ready to be both a father and a mother yet - and we pleased each other quite nicely.  It wasn't either urgent or hesitant; just two people who really like each other trying to make each other happy.  We both fell asleep with smiles on our faces.
I admit, I made waffles when we woke up just to use the cool stainless-steel appliance; besides, it was kind of fun to be the girl, making her guy breakfast and delivering it in just an oversized t-shirt and panties.  I find I kind of have to reinforce that with Doug; his mind naturally tends to look for the thing which contradicts what he's told.  It makes him a good lawyer, but can make our relationship tricky.

So we fooled around a little more after breakfast, and I told him I'd had a great time but, you know, he had promised me a movie.  So, not wanting to be remiss, he ordered us some tickets for Harry Potter at the Aquarium's IMAX screen online.  I teased him about it being overcomensating, but we still had a pretty good time.  I did, however, grin like a fool when I saw that Spider-Man 2 would be playing there starting next week.

Can't get the whole weekend off, though, so I had to work today.  And then when I got home, I started getting stuff ready for tomorrow, since I won't have much time between when I get off work and when I expect people to start showing up.

And now that I should get some sleep, I can't.  It's like staying up until midnight on New Year's Eve; you know it doesn't really mean anything, that it's just an arbitrary point to mark off where one year starts and another begins (and that "year" in this case isn't quite the exact term a unit of measurement should be)... but...

-Marti