tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-55779702024-03-17T05:27:29.253-04:00Transplanted LifeIn July of 2003, nanomachines were introduced into the brains of Martin Hartle and Michelle Garber and activated, exchanging the contents of those minds. It's happened at least four other times, but that one produced me - Martina Hart, thirty years of male experience in the body of a woman in her mid-twenties (and a killer figure, if I do say so myself). As you might imagine, my life has been crazy ever since.Jasonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08878262302237069963noreply@blogger.comBlogger620125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5577970.post-85243104273777502892010-01-20T00:06:00.000-05:002010-01-20T00:07:16.858-05:00Part of my New Year's ResolutionI told everybody at Jen's party a three weeks ago that I wouldn't be a shut-in any more, and I meant it. I know it's not good for me, and to be honest, I don't like it. I used to be the most annoying person about telling people that even Blu-ray isn't an acceptable substitute for seeing things in the theater, even comedies and independent dramas; now I haven't even seen <I>Avatar</I> yet because I don't want to go out; I'm honestly saying I'll wait for Netflix. I liked showing my assets off, now I sit home alone in bulky sweats more or less 24/7. Last year was the first season I can remember where I didn't see a game at Fenway Park, although I've got an excuse for most of the season.<br /><br />You'd think that my not wanting to leave the house would have led to a lot more blogging, but that's just another way to communicate with the outside world, and for the better part of the last year, my thoughts have been along the lines of how the outside world is <I>dangerous</I>. I was quite honestly ready to take this whole blog down, unable to believe how stupid the whole thing was from the moment I woke up as Michelle, even if it was the only thing that kept me sane at first. Just how much had Korpin learned about me just from reading it? About Amy? And we know he's not the end of it.<br /><br />Like my shrink says, being kidnapped will straight-up fuck your head up.<br /><br />Anyone reading this will hopefully forgive me for not giving a whole lot of details about that event, or the months following it. I haven't told Kate, Jen, Telly, Amy, or Carlos, except in the vaguest terms. Forget Mom, although I know my silence probably hurts her. I don't even talk about it with Shelly, and who would understand the situation more? I will, eventually, but here's not the place to do it. And I'm definitely not ready.<br /><br />It was hard for me just to get to Jen's party. I wanted to go, but I wouldn't take the T or even a cab. I've been using Zipcars when I wanted to get someplace and I couldn't have things delivered, but by the time I stopped dithering and said yes, I would go, they were all booked. Kate eventually had to take the T to Jen's and Carlos's place, borrow her car, and come back to pick me up. Pathetic, but at least pathetic enough to serve as a wake-up call.<br /><br />So that's when I made the resolution to stop being afraid of the world. Not that I've acted upon it much yet, but I'm going to the movies this weekend and writing this. So that's a start.<br /><br />-MartinaJasonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08878262302237069963noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5577970.post-69685346647491989482009-03-05T09:37:00.000-05:002009-03-05T09:39:10.596-05:00Of courseI haven't been keeping particular track of anniversaries, which I suppose makes me an atypical girlfriend or a bad boyfriend-type person, but I honestly wouldn't be surprised if the thing with Kate has lasted longer than any relationship I remember having. It's certainly my longest as a woman, and is probably right up there with Maggie from my previous life. We've been cohabiting for over a year, our families like each other, and we've even gotten to the point where being together was assumed to the point where we were making purchases together.<br /><br />So, naturally, it was time for us to fuck it up.<br /><br />Kate's got a lot of theories as to why it fell apart. Most of the women our age are getting married and starting families, and while we're fortunate to live in a state where we can do the former, science hasn't progressed to the point where we can do the latter (at least, so far as I know; given what the last six years of my life have been like, I can't exactly take that for granted). We're close enough in personality that the small disagreements seem bigger, and then when we disagree on something big, watch out! Other things I can't even begin to understand.<br /><br />I was talking about this the other night, in a bar with Telly and Amy. Amy nodded sympathetically, but after about ten minutes, Telly snorted, and banged his glass on the bar a little harder than necessary. "You girls are making it way too complicated. It comes down to one thing: <I>The two of you aren't gay</I>."<br /><br />Amy and I started in, saying that sexual identity and orientation were more complicated than a simple gay/straight description, especially for people like us, and he cut us off.<br /><br />"I get that, ladies, I really do, but honestly, it's impressive that you managed to stay together as long as you have. It shows just how much the two of you really like each other; I don't doubt that either of you would rather spend time with the other than the average guy. But, geez, Tina, you've got my sister's hormones and brain. She was into a lot of things, but other girls wasn't one of them. How long did you think you were going to fight that?"<br /><br />He's right, of course, and not just about me; I think both of us were starting to realize that being with each other was, to a certain extent, hiding from what we really wanted, even if we were afraid of it for our own reasons: Kate has tended toward really terrible breakups, and even after five plus years in this body, I still second-guess the hell out of the whole boy-girl thing, especially now that I'm starting to get some awareness of my biological clock. The good times of a few months ago, when we would go out and be a little flirty only to frustrate guys when we pulled back toward each other, well, weren't quite such good times any more. I can't speak for Kate, but I know I had the occasional thought of breaking from the script, except that I couldn't do that to Kate.<br /><br />That we're feeling that is probably healthy, but it still festers, and makes us snippy. I'm pretty sure that we'll still be friends when all this is over, but even though I've moved into the spare bedroom, it's not a fun month right now.<br /><br />-TinaJasonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08878262302237069963noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5577970.post-88784507217287523102008-12-30T22:06:00.000-05:002008-12-30T22:07:34.456-05:00Christmas '08Man, I missed a whole holiday there. Thanksgiving wasn't terribly exciting, though.<br /><br />The big present under the tree this year wasn't really a surprise - Kate and I split a Blu-ray player and a bunch of movies. She took a little convincing, of course - as much as she likes movies, she's not nearly as big on the technical stuff as me, and she didn't really think that there was that much difference between it and DVD. She's not alone, and no amount of me throwing numbers and specs at her was going to convince her.<br /><br />So, I kind of tricked her. I bought a cheap HD DVD player and movies off eBay, and once we sat down to watch some of those, she was noticing the difference. For a while, picking up really cheap movies as various places cleared out their inventory was enough - truth be told, it's kind of ridiculous what you can get. The 1920x1080 resolution of HD isn't that far off from the digital projection in a movie people that some folks inexplicably prefer to film, and it doesn't take a lot of searching to find HD DVDs that sell for less than a ticket to see the movie in theaters would have cost. Anyway, that was fun for a while, but when Criterion started releasing Blu-rays, that was game over; she had to have <I>Chungking Express</I>.<br /><br />Oddly enough, she still doesn't think the improved picture is quite as amazing as I do, but she really likes the improved sound. I tend to think that the whole lossless audio thing is 50% placebo effect - you tell someone the quality is improved, and they'll convince themselves that they hear it - although if that was true, you'd think people would be snapping them up for the video, too. My pet theory on that is that audio lets people convince themselves that they're special - anyone can see an improvement when when the picture's got six times as many pixels, but noticing a difference that is well past most benchmarks for human hearing? Only the selected few can do that.<br /><br />Still, Kate's reaction to certain movies on HD just re-establishes how cool she is: She does dig that HD is good enough that you can actually see the grain structure of the film. I've talked to a bunch of people who see HD and want it all to be smoothed out and look like the Discovery Channel, as opposed to, you know, what film looks like.<br /><br />So, pretty normal Christmas, as such things go. For me, at least. For others, it was a bit odd.<br /><br />Telly and Amy, for instance, flew out to California so that the Sanadas could meet their biological daughter's boyfriend. It's not that Amy and they are particularly close - she really does tend to stay away - but they still wanted to meet. As Telly explained it, when you're one defective condom away from having grandchildren, it's good to have a handle on everyone involved.<br /><br />I get that. As much as my mother tells me that the nine months she spent carrying Carter's body doesn't compare to the years she spent raising me (a tremendous simplification, but I certainly like to hear it), she does keep tabs on him, Nat, and her grandson.<br /><br />Telly found the whole thing sort of surreal, even beyond what anyone connected to Amy's and my lives sees on a regular basis. Of course, part of it is that Telly has never flown before, and he found that pretty crazy, both being up in the air and the entire airport experience. I told him he should try international travel, and he didn't even want to think of it.<br /><br />The visit itself was uncomfortable; Mrs. Sanada doesn't speak much English, and though Amy has been taking some language courses, it was hard to communicate without her father working as an intermediary. The whole thing was kind of awkward, not like any "meet the parents" he's ever done, more like two sets of strangers, one trying to force themselves to worry about the other's feelings and the other trying to do the opposite.<br /><br />On the other hand, they got lost often enough to confirm that Amy didn't have any residual knowledge of the city from before. One down, she says, and the rest of America to do.<br /><br />-TinaJasonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08878262302237069963noreply@blogger.com68tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5577970.post-75915722680699576962008-11-01T10:30:00.000-04:002008-11-01T10:30:01.185-04:00Halloween '08Jen always used to throw the best parties, and I guess she still does; it's just that the type of party is a little different nowadays. After all, Eloise is two years and four months old now, so it's not just adults getting together any more - it's the little guys, who are awesome and adorable, although to say they don't cramp our styles a little would be a lie.<br /><br />It's kind of silly, in some ways - what's a kid Eloise's age care if mommy's friends wear sexy costumes? It's not like "sexy" registers with them at two! Regardless of that, though, the invitation to the party specifically mentioned family-friendly costumes, since some of Eloise's friends from day care would be there too, along with their brothers and sisters. None were older than seven, but some of the parents still looked askance at my Batgirl costume. Okay, sure, it's a little tight, but still - no high heels, cleavage, butt-cheek, or even bare leg - I was hardly Emma Frost out there.<br /><br />Heh. As I was telling Kate and Jen later, perhaps the biggest disappointment wasn't newly-minted prudes (who probably wore far more prostitute-y costumes than me back in the day) tsk-tsking with disapproval, but just how many times this conversation happened:<br /><br />"Nice costume."<br /><br />"Thanks. It's kind of out of date, but Jen's place isn't really handicapped accessible."<br /><br />Blank stare.<br /><br />"You really should read <I>The Killing Joke</I> and <I>Birds of Prey</I>. Some fans don't like Barbara Gordon being Oracle instead of Batgirl, but that she can still be a hero after the Joker paralyzed her is really inspiring, I think. Not like a real person, of course, but it's a nice idea to have out there--"<br /><br />... and they walk away, no matter how interested they'd been in my tight spandex and red-dyed hair. I swear, I used to hang out with a nerdier crowd, one that would have laughed.<br /><br />Not that I care about men wanting to be around me - after all, I get to go home with Princess Leia and they don't, so I'm ahead of them. I guess it's just another sign of how I'm starting to catch up to where I was. Five years ago, Martin-me was getting some of the same sort of pressure to leave things like comics and Halloween behind, and now it's happening again.<br /><br />The funny thing is, all those parents who are so much more mature than me were talking about how much fun it was to dress up with their kids and share their excitement, or how Billy liked Transformers and they'd forgotten how much they'd liked them as kids. I don't deny that that is fantastic, but it seems kind of silly to deny yourself things you like between the time you deem yourself too old for it and when your kids are old enough. Not that adults trying to remain kids is a good thing, but a person can be a responsible adult <I>and</I> enjoy a healthy fantasy life.<br /><br />-"Tina" (Eloise has trouble with my whole name, but her saying the short version is cute.)Jasonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08878262302237069963noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5577970.post-54659454007431281322008-10-29T23:12:00.001-04:002008-10-29T23:14:35.720-04:00DiscontinuitiesAt least, that's my story and I'm sticking to it. Like the other folks who are left reading this thing, I looked at that last post and thought, man, is she full of herself. I'm not saying I don't stand behind what I say in it, but I think the feeling is something that maybe doesn't translate to someone who hasn't lived this sort of life. It's not that most people don't notice changes to their body and aging, but it's a continuous process, whereas I have a discontinuity in my life in July 2003. Most people don't have a first impression of their own body, so when they look in the mirror in the morning, they are mostly comparing themselves to how they looked the day before, and changes are minor. It's all relative to them. I'm always comparing myself to how I looked when this body was twenty-five; there's the long-dismissed (but still rooted) idea in my head of returning Michelle's body to her as I found it.<br /><br />Anyway, I don't expect anyone else to particularly sympathize or understand, but that's what was going on in my head that day.<br /><br />So, I've been holding back a bit - whenever I've been planning on writing something, I'd sit back and think, is this (a) special and (b) not whining? As it turns out, my life has been in that sort of rut for the last few months - good enough that any complaints are not really worth mentioning, though not to the extent of being good news<br /><br />Saturday was fun, though - one of Telly's bands actually booked itself a good gig. Not a great one, but in the Harvard Square area, which is better than some of the places he's played. The worst, I gather, was a weekday gig at a place out in Cambridgeside that is tough to find not because it's off the beaten path, but because a cajun bar & grill sharing a building with a health club (which has the much larger sign and the front door) is going to get overlooked. Very clean, he said, but not many customers, which kind of sucks when most of your pay is expected to be a percentage of the bar.<br /><br />Not a problem here: It was Saturday night, there were plenty of college kids looking to get a bit lit, and the place actually had some decent beer on tap, so Kate, Amy, and I were willing to help the cause.<br /><br />I was kind of surprised by some of what they were playing. Most of it was your standard bar rock - Stevie Ray Vaughn and other rhythm and blues types, probably from before most of the people involved were born. A few originals, too, but also some oddball picks. I didn't know you <I>could</I> do a rock & roll arrangement of "The Highwayman", or that these guys would play it. Telly later claimed it as his idea - "country" doesn't just mean the south, but is big in places like rural New England, too - he'd heard a bunch of it growing up in Vermont. Besides, he said, if you can't respect music by the combination of Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, and Waylon Jennings, you're a pretty ridiculous little snot; that's some talent right there.<br /><br />It was fun to get up and dance a little, and probably good for me, too. Even when you're with someone, it's nice to be looked at, and this body's impending thirtieth birthday didn't seem to be what people were thinking of when we got out on the floor. (Yay boobs! Yay dancing with another girl!)<br /><br />- MartinaJasonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08878262302237069963noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5577970.post-54252040654160653482008-08-31T23:24:00.000-04:002008-09-01T01:28:15.312-04:00Skipping BirthdaysAt what age do most people with normal lives stop making a big deal out of their birthdays?<br /><br />I ask this, of course, because among the many, many days where I didn't write anything here this summer was July 18th, which marked five years of Martina, even if I didn't realize who I was or use that name at first. It didn't go completely unobserved - even if Kate and I were in Montreal at the time, there was a party when we got back home, which was fun and all.<br /><br />It sent me into a bit of a funk, though. It's lasted much of the summer, too nebulous to put into words for the most part, and what I've finally started to credit it too seems both obvious and overly simplistic.<br /><br />I'm getting <I>older</I>.<br /><br />We all are, of course, but it's still kind of a shock for me. When the contents of my mind was placed in Michelle's body, it felt like getting five years younger in a lot of ways, and there's something exciting about that. And for a long time, I would think of myself as a twenty-nine year-old man in a twenty-four year-old body, even as time started passing. Now that I've caught up, it's time to assess things somewhat, and I'm not sure about where I stand.<br /><br />Professionally, I've spent the last five years getting back to where Martin was before the switch. Everyone I know looks at it as an accomplishment, since they see it as someone who was a receptionist five years ago in a professional job with vacation and benefits and a good salary, but for me that's having been forcibly knocked down the ladder, and kind of a disappointment. We all have fantasies that if we could start afresh knowing what we knew now... Most of them involve being able to leapfrog something, which didn't happen for me.<br /><br />In a way, I almost envy Amy with her clean slate. Bits of skills reappear, along with some random facts or unexpected instincts, but the disappointment isn't there. I know she's got her own demons, and I wouldn't want any part of those, but knowing is its own issue.<br /><br />Another thing that reminds me that I'm not still the person who I became five years ago is, well, my physical flesh. This body will turn thirty this November 18th, and I'm hardly the first person to recognize that approaching thirty as a man and approaching it as a woman are two different things. I don't really mind the lines on my face, in part because I've come to accept that face a lot more; I'll even admit to being sort of pretty, if you like brunettes without much in the way of cheekbones. The laugh lines help. But I've been finding fewer opportunities to put on my bikini this summer. My butt's softer than it used to be, and my breasts are starting to sag in opposite directions, giving me that inverted-V cleavage should I wear a dress that I can't wear a bra with. I'm swimming twice a week rather than just on Wednesdays, and it's wearing me out a bit more.<br /><br />Five years also makes me feel like I've failed Michelle somehow, not having answers for Telly about what happened to her mind. No-one really expects me to, and it's mostly Agent Jones and company that have the resources to look, but it's more personal for me, and I've failed.<br /><br />Kate says I shouldn't worry about it, but this is her first time facing down the big three-oh, and she's pretty satisfied with her life. Me, I feel like everything in my life but her is running behind. (And don't get me started on the "subtle" hints my mother's been dropping about that!)<br /><br />-MartiJasonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08878262302237069963noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5577970.post-44994820842135370842008-06-27T21:23:00.001-04:002008-06-27T21:25:14.655-04:00She Knew UsAh, to be young. Kate and I have been working like mad over the last couple weeks, trying to get as far ahead in work as possible before spending a couple weeks in Montreal for the end of the <A HREF="http://www.montrealjazzfest.com/Fijm2008/splash.aspx">Jazz Festival</A> and the start of <A HREF="http://www.fantasiafestival.com">Fantasia</A>. Telly and Amy, on the other hand, have had time on their hands. Amy's taking a couple of summer classes and working a part time job, while Telly works something approximating full time and is in a couple of bands, but is still somehow able to thrive on four or five hours of sleep on average. Of course, like everybody, they tend to assume that everybody shares their schedule, which means that they don't think twice calling at 2:30am with news.<br /><br />They woke Kate up first, though not by design. Since I spend most of my free time in movies, and can be a little scatterbrained, I almost never take my phone off vibrate, which mean the thing didn't have a chance in hell of waking me up from the bedside table. Kate, naturally, is peculiarly sensitive to the growl created by a vibrating phone on a hard object, and woke up almost instantly. It must have taken her all of a second to realize it wasn't hers, because the thing was still going when she twisted my nipple to wake me up.<br /><br />I shot her a look and picked it up, seeing that it was Telly calling. I said something along the line of if he was in jail, he was staying there at least until morning.<br /><br />"Why would I be in jail and why would you think that? Anyway, it's not that - Amy remembered something!"<br /><br /><I>That</I> cleared all the cobwebs out. "What? Does she know who she is?"<br /><br />"Nothing that big, just - we got home late, and we thought it might be fun to make milkshakes--"<br /><br />"Why?"<br /><br />"I dunno, we've just been making milkshakes lately. You gave us that movie on DVD because the Blu-ray came out a month later, then she bought a blender and once she'd bought it she figured we should get use out of it and the syrups and--"<br /><br />"Forget I asked and get to the important part!"<br /><br />"Right, right - anyway, we were making milkshakes, but hadn't done the dishes for a few days, so we decided to use the steins. She made a comment about how she didn't figure my grandmother intended me to use them for milkshakes, and I laughed, but as we were drinking them I couldn't for the life of me remember telling her that Nana had given them to me, and neither could she."<br /><br />"There's a million explanations; we've told that story a lot."<br /><br />"Yeah, when it happened. Right after <A HREF="http://www.transplantedlife.com/2005/12/weird-and-exciting-and-exhausting-part_29.html">that weird Christmas</A>, but I'm pretty sure I haven't told anybody the story in like a year and a half. Have you?"<br /><br />I couldn't remember telling it, and Telly said he'd checked, and it wasn't in the blog. So she must have heard it from us, but if neither of us told "Amy Sanada"...<br /><br />"That's thin."<br /><br />"It's only one thing, the big thing. She's said other things that I just assumed we'd told her, but now--"<br /><br />At this point Amy grabbed the phone. "And I'm doing better in school. I dropped all my music courses, and I've started taking stuff that seemed 'familiar', for lack of a better word; it just seems like I'm being reminded of things a lot of the time. I think my memory is putting itself back together."<br /><br />"That's great!"<br /><br />"Don't you get it? Korpin is the person most likely to know all this! I don't want to be him!"<br /><br />"You probably aren't. And even if you are, even if you remember everything, that doesn't mean you'll suddenly become a monster - you'll still be a product of the last two years, your own person, okay?"<br /><br />"I suppose."<br /><br />I asked if she wanted me to come over, but she said she thought she could handle it. I suggested she might want to make an appointment with her therapist, and she thought that sounded pretty good.<br /><br />We finally hung up. I told Kate what it was all about, and she said she almost felt bad leaving them to go on vacation. I rubbed my still sore nipple, asking if she felt bad about that. "A little. I just figured, since you still sometimes get surprised by your body when you wake up suddenly, that would be the quickest way to wake you up. That can take some doing, you know." She pulled my t-shirt up and kissed it. "Better?"<br /><br />Much, I said. We looked in each other's eyes... then saw they were closing, laughed, and fell back asleep.<br /><br />-MartiJasonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08878262302237069963noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5577970.post-61011728792802487682008-06-03T16:41:00.000-04:002008-06-03T16:42:16.170-04:00Not officially summer, but...It is, finally, starting to be nice in and around Boston on a regular basis. There were a few fake-out weekends in April and early May - the sort where you wake up, put on shorts, a t-shirt, a skirt, or something otherwise not all-covering, and that's nice until you come out of the afternoon movie realizing that it's really not enough.<br /><br />And by "you" I mean "me". When I was male and single I would do it all the time because I would choose my outfit based on what I thought it ought to be like weather-wise (and because a weekend day when you could wear shorts meant you could push doing laundry back an extra twenty-four hours), with maybe a cursory glance out the window to make sure I wasn't doing something egregiously stupid. Kate, being far more responsible, will see me and ask if I've even checked the weather channel.<br /><br />Another sure sign of summer is mini-moving day. The start of June isn't quite like the main event September First, especially since it's spread out a bit by the dorms of what seem like hundreds of colleges kicking kids out in waves during the month of May, but that also means that the ones who are going to stay on for the summer are looking for sublets or June-to-May arrangements, and there are people moving stuff out to the Cape or some other summer home.<br /><br />This year, despite only having known each other <A HREF="http://www.transplantedlife.com/2008/03/soap-opera-stuff.html">a couple months</A>, that means Amy and Telly sharing an apartment. I don't know exactly how long-term an arrangement it is - they have only known each other for a while and Telly's place is way at the end of the 1 bus from Harvard Square - but it works for them now. Telly gets rid of the deadbeat roommates, Amy at least has a place to stay between now and the start of her senior year, and curious blood relatives and friends get to watch and see if this relationship is going to work on an accelerated timetable.<br /><br />-MartiJasonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08878262302237069963noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5577970.post-4287902527251119192008-05-17T23:33:00.000-04:002008-05-17T23:34:26.254-04:00I really don't want my blog to become one of those blogs, even though this post is one of those posts from those blogsWhat are "those blogs"? There's a bunch of different types, but the one I'm thinking of is blogs which go a long time between posts, and then spend the post that finally does appear talking about why it's been such a long time between posts, but then soon the author isn't posting very often, and the whole vicious cycle starts again. I don't know whether that makes the result a blog about blogging or a blog about not blogging, but it's weak, no matter what.<br /><br />This is probably the tenth time or so I've written something about what this sporadic posting means, that my life has settled into something normal, accepted, or routine with the chances of figuring out the cause of the circumstances shrinking as the trial gets colder and colder. Still true, though. I think this is the first time that I mention that I'm looking at the sidebar and how the blog updates weekly because I was posting that often five years ago. I feel vaguely guilty about not being even close to that schedule nowadays, even though the rational part of my mind says that it's not like I'm obligated to produce this for anyone...<br /><br />(Also: Holy crap, five years! That's like a double-digit percentage of my life!)<br /><br />So what have I been up to? Red Sox games - I've already been to four or five, thanks to the way my buying tickets back in January clustered and picking up a game from someone at work who has season tickets. It felt pretty good to have them win the first three games I went to, prompting the inevitable comments about how I should go every day. Probably healthy that they eventually lost, or else I might have thought there was something to it. It's not a good idea to start thinking you have control over things you don't.<br /><br />I did get to see Masterson's first major league game, though, and he was pretty darn good. Last year I saw Buchholz's first game and he pitched a no-hitter the next time he was called up, so it's worth watching next time, eh?<br /><br />Kate and I also volunteered at the Independent Film Festival of Boston, which was cool, although I chickened out of meeting Famke Janssen. I would likely have blurted something out about having had a crush on her since her appearance on <I>Star Trek: The Next Generation</I>, but that might have been weird.<br /><br />I think next year Kate and I will show our support of the festival by buying passes. It felt good to volunteer, no question about it, but most of the time when I go to a film festival, I'm looking to see a bunch of movies, and working the festival prevents that. It's kind of selfish, since there'd be no festival if everyone who loved movies in the area took that attitude.<br /><br />And there's been a few other things where, well, to write about them properly would have meant writing about other people's personal lives, and I find myself more reluctant to do that nowadays. It seems like it was easier to do it a few years ago, when I was unsure of who I was and every relationship or observation seemed like it was vital unexplored territory. Now, not so much.<br /><br />So, there's my last month and a half. Hopefully I'll never make another post like this again.<br /><br />-MartiJasonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08878262302237069963noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5577970.post-14706627300702594442008-03-31T22:00:00.000-04:002008-03-31T22:01:50.024-04:00Soap opera stuffTelly and I have been hanging aorund more the past couple of months, since <A HREF="http://www.transplantedlife.com/2008/01/when-mothers-collide.html">my mom visited at Christmas</A>. Not a whole lot, but every once in a while, especially when I feel like doing some guy stuff that Kate figures a woman with a girlfriend rather than a boyfriend has no need to put up with. Kate had no need to go see <I>Doomsday</I>, for instance, so I went with Telly and lapped up the over-the-top post-apocalyptic violence.<br /><br />That's not the sort of thing he and Michelle would do together, I gather, but it's getting less awkward for us. He'll never look at me and not see her, of course, but I kind of like that. I'll have been this person for five years this summer, and I've gotten so used to it that before I started hanging out with Telly on a regular basis again, I could go weeks without thinking about Michelle. I identify as Martina now, and I'm pretty sure that I'd put up a fight over giving Michelle her body back were she to resurface, but even if I've only met "her" once or twice, she's too important a part of my life story to not stay in my thoughts.<br /><br />Telly benefits from this arrangement, too, by having at least a surrogate for his sister in his life, and in more material ways. Last week, for instance, he called me to mention that his roommates had screwed up with the cable bill, and Comcast wasn't going to do anything to fix it for another week, and he'd reeeeeeeeeally like to watch the red Sox opening series in Japan... In high definition if possible. And, as far as I knew, he is really good at making pancakes.<br /><br />So, fine, I say; he can show up early in the morning on Tuesday and Wednesday to watch the games with me, especially if he made breakfast. I was sure Kate would appreciate it, too, even if she wasn't going to stay around to watch the entire game like we were. At about the same time, Amy called Kate asking hte same thing - only for her, it was not wanting to wake her roommates up, figuring she should express an interest because it was in Japan and she should start trying to learn something about her body's ancestral home. Kate said, sure, she knew I was was going to be watching the game, so why not? And, sure, she could stay over the night before rather than wake her roommate with a 4:30am alarm.<br /><br />I didn't see it coming when Kate mentioned it, or when Amy showed up the night before, but I probably should have at least predicted the possibility. Anyway, Telly arrived Tuesday morning, saw Amy on the couch wearing her Matsuzaka babydoll t-shirt and pajama bottoms, with extra-cute bedhead (hair covered her right eye but stuck up on the left side) and bare feet, and was pretty much incapable of speech until at least the fourth inning. I think he finally got up the nerve to ask for her number after the second game, when I shooed them out right after the last pitch so I could lock up and still catch the 9am bus, because it was the next afternoon that Amy started frantically IMing me saying that she hadn't expected him to call, and was it weird for him to be attracted to her knowing what he knows, and was it okay if she called him back and said she would like to go to dinner and a movie Saturday night...?<br /><br />I told her the truth - that we share DNA doesn't mean I can put him off-limits, even if I want to. Besides, we're just talking about one dinner and movie right now, and it's not like you're going to find a lot of guys who are more comfortable with your unique situation, even if Telly's still just getting used to it.<br /><br />I think she'd been trying to get me to give her an easy out, but it wasn't my place. Besides, the part of me that's a little disappointed in just how normal, relatively speaking, my life has become is kind of curious to see how that works out.<br /><br />I'm also curious to know what Kate told Telly when he called her for advice about dating an exchangee, but I've been told to mind my own business.<br /><br />-MartiJasonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08878262302237069963noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5577970.post-41862404821589615562008-03-15T06:49:00.000-04:002008-03-15T06:50:12.297-04:00Weird dreamsThis happens every once in a while. Things will be moving along completely normally, and then I'll start having weird dreams and won't be able to shake them. I used to think they were symptoms, that maybe something was wrong with my brain or that its contents were somehow getting corrupted, but now I just treat them as the inevitable result of a life that is inherently weird, even when it seems to have stabilized. After all, dreams are just your subconscious mind processing and filing the events of your life, fitting them into some sort of holograph, and I've got some unusual associations to make.<br /><br />The one that's currently driving me up the wall seems normal enough, but at some point I have this realization - that everybody in the world is a single aspect of some sort of universal consciousness, and once I realize that they start disappearing, sucked into me and gone except for a tiny voice that soon fades from my mind. Soon I'm alone in the world, waking up when the loneliness starts to hurt.<br /><br />Sometimes, as this happens, I'll acquire the physical traits of the people I absorb, and I'll be a man again. In the dream I'll find Kate and make passionate love to her, and I'll wake as she disappears. I'll wake to see her in the bed and hold her, and a couple of times it progressed, but then... Well, there's a part of me that's thinking that we had just been having sex "properly", and I'll feel disappointed that I wasn't able to do that for her.<br /><br />Which is why I'm in the living room, typing it up rather than waking her. I had to find an aspirin anyway, as this time the end of the dream came with a headache, but it's not something she needs dumped on her early Saturday morning. Let her sleep in.<br /><br />Maybe I should see a shrink like Amy. Hopefully this will pass before it comes to that.<br /><br />-MartiJasonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08878262302237069963noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5577970.post-37525140792119399572008-02-12T22:46:00.001-05:002008-02-12T22:47:52.803-05:00Big and Little ScienceKate and I went to the <A HREF="http://www.coolidge.org">Coolidge Corner Theater's</A> "Science on Screen" series last night, in part because I wanted to get some use out of my membership there - I don't use my discount nearly as much as I do my <A HREF="http://www.brattlefilm.org">Brattle</A> one and had never seen <I>Body Heat</I>, but also because there was a lecture about the chemical and biological basis of sexual attraction paired with it. I like nifty science, and the subject is pretty personal to me. I think this is going to be the first Valentine's Day where I'm honestly and truly content with my romantic situation since my previous life, and it makes me a little nervous; after all, my <A HREF="http://www.transplantedlife.com/2004/02/my-legs-are-killing-me.html">first one</A> was the result of some sophisticated <A HREF="http://www.transplantedlife.com/2004/04/called-in-sick-today.html">targeted pheromones</A>, and it's made me more than a little nervous about every relationship since.<br /><br />One the lecture reminded me of is just what a black box all the weird stuff I've been subjected to actually is. When I was a kid, there was an anthology of John W. Campbell's early space operas in the town library, and I read it several times. I forget who wrote the introduction - I want to say it was Isaac Asimov, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't - but he rightly made the point that Campbell made a much better editor than writer, and his view of how science and engineering worked was absolutely absurd to anybody who had actually worked in the field. Things went from a peculiar phenomenon being observed in the lab to scientific breakthrough to prototype to an assembly line in what seemed like a couple weeks. The earthbound engineers at the start of the first book were moving planets at the end of the third.<br /><br />These were great fun for me to read as a young boy, make no mistake. As a kid, I think you need to be fed this kind of grand literature, where utterly amazing things are possible and they can be done by a small group of people in a relatively short amount of time. It's what motivates kids to get into science and engineering; the realities of actual incremental progress and bureaucracy and the millions of false starts per breakthrough can come later, after they are too far along the road to just become accountants. Kate says it works much the same way for girls, only they get books about first love at first sight that don't mention unwanted advances, dates that just don't work out, divorce... I must say, I'm kind of glad that I never had to deal with whatever the female equivalent of the Heinlein juvenile was.<br /><br />Anyway, to get back to what I was talking about, I have pesonally been the target of some chemicals that showed a pretty sophisticated understanding of how attraction among human beings worked, almost four years ago. But last night, the guy was lecturing about what experimental studies of ferrets tell us, and how much uncertainty there is about it, and how they hope to learn more. I got a chance to talk with him before the film, and he knew my name - as you might imagine, my case is known within his field, just like it is among neurologists and nanotech researchers. He had to admit that he regarded it (at least the "love potion" parts) with a bit of suspicion, though - it was fascinating if true, but nobody had been able to reverse-engineer the stuff I gave Maggie, to the point where they could even suss out the general principles it worked under. And absent working theories, it's just a very interesting hypothesis. So apparently I'm cold fusion.<br /><br />It does lead me to wonder about a few things. Both the love potion and the nanotech are advanced, functional (even robust!) bits of technology. How did they come about? If the nanotech worked well enough to switch me four and a half years ago, how long were they in development before that? How many people had their brains fried in failed trials? And how did it stay under the radar, and then stay that way even after people started using it, at least so far as anybody I've talked to knows.<br /><br />Disturbing. But, then again, as Kate and I were taking the bus home, we saw a sign in the window of a library branch about "what Harvard's 50-year plan means for us". It just boggles my mind that Harvard, or any organization, can sit down an make plans on that scale. I suppose if a university can plot what they're going to do with their real estate that far in advance, I suppose something like my situation and the near-total lack of an evidence trail leading to it makes a little more sense, if there's an organization with a grand enough vision behind it.<br /><br />I hope it's not the U.S. Government. Or Harvard.<br /><br />-MartiJasonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08878262302237069963noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5577970.post-91923971161672431482008-01-17T18:32:00.000-05:002008-01-17T18:33:09.360-05:00When Mothers CollideIt's funny, but I didn't realize how much I'd enjoyed having Telly around until we fell out of contact. I can't blame him for shutting me out, and it's hardly something that was entirely his doing. I tended to avoid him for the same reasons he avoided me - the revelation that Mikhail Korpin wasn't Michelle in his body but was the real thing had the effect of shattering any familial relations that might have grown between us then. I know it made me uneasy about trying to bond with them; the memory of someone preying on that desire and trust was still too fresh.<br /><br />The woman who raised me had different ideas, though. I couldn't live this life without having some relationship with my genetic relatives, and she wasn't willing to. As she puts it, she knows most of me, but there's a part which comes from them: Anything I've got a genetic tendency toward, or maybe there were experiences that made a deep enough impression on Michelle's brain that even emptying it out and pouring me in didn't get rid of them entirely. There was an involved metaphor about and demonstration of a pencil making an impression that's still there even after erasing it and writing something new, but never mind.<br /><br />I resisted. I tried to point out that I didn't much <I>like</I> Michelle's mother, and that Telly and I weren't talking much, but she didn't care. I don't think I'll ever be able to refuse her anything again, honestly, since even if she doesn't say as much, I owe her. I can't ever repay her fully for allowing her to think that someone else was her Martin, then laying the burden of that knowledge on her (I know! Totally unfair!). So I called Telly, and though he was reluctant, he agreed to set something up for the weekend of the 22nd & 23rd (gads, almost a whole month ago!).<br /><br />He met us at the bus stop again and was very gentlemanly in escorting my mother into the car. He was a little surprised at her age, but Mom pointed out that Martin was five years older than Michelle and that she and my father had unexpectedly become parents in their late thirties. Ah, he said, that makes sense. Then he chuckled and said he'd missed that sort of thing. Nothing in his life requires explanation or defied belief.<br /><br />The visit itself wasn't really something I got a lot out of. I'd met Mrs. Garber before, and I can't say the past couple of years have really improved her any. My mother has twenty years on her and it shows in her silver hair and skinny limbs, but she still has a vitality to her that Mrs. G doesn't. Now, though Mrs. G has the added pleasantness of feeling like she's owed something out of the whole situation with me and Michelle and everybody. It was kind of awesome to see Mom call her on it toward the end of the visit, pointing out that Mrs. G didn't talk about how worried she was about Michelle or asking if we'd heard anything about her from the FBI - it was all "how can they do something to/for me".<br /><br />I was basically glad to get out of there, and figured that would be the end of it, but Telly called a few days into the new year, asking what Kate and I were up to. I said Kete wasn't around, but we could hang out.<br /><br />We've been doing that a lot more lately. He wonders if this is what it's like to find out you've got a long-lost brother or sister and meet them later in life (say you were adopted, or your father got around) - they look kind of familiar, but they don't share certain things with you. It's weird, but kind of fun to discover.<br /><br />I have to say I agree, and I am enjoying getting to know him again.<br /><br />-MartinaJasonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08878262302237069963noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5577970.post-82262488977620836272007-12-31T22:54:00.001-05:002007-12-31T22:54:42.191-05:00I love you ma, but...Seventeen days is a long time to have a houseguest. Yes, we were counting by the end.<br /><br />Understand, I love my mother. She has put up with more over the past four and a half years than anyone should have to. And when she first broached the idea of coming up for the holidays, Kate and I were both enthusiastic. We've got the spare bedroom, it would be a shame not to use it, and it would be very nice to get back in touch with that part of my original family.<br /><br />And it was. There was just so much to do, though - she wanted to meet the Garbers, for instance, which meant a weekend in Vermont. She had to meet Kate's folks. She also had old friends from Maine coming down to see her while I was at work during the day, and on top of that she was disappointed that Nat and Marty couldn't come out.<br /><br />In some ways, it was like crunch time at work, when you've got this one big project that needs finishing, and there's no time for anything else. For the better part of three weeks, everything aside from work was about making things work for mom, and it was exhausting.<br /><br />But rewarding. I really feel like Mom has completely accepted me for who I am now, and when we had unscheduled time to shop or otherwise, it was good. Simultaneously familiar and novel.<br /><br />Still, it both nice to have her in town and nice to bring her to the airport this afternoon.<br /><br />-MartiJasonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08878262302237069963noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5577970.post-5335716029042732022007-11-28T18:43:00.000-05:002007-11-28T18:44:13.162-05:00Thanksgiving with familyKate had wanted to have Thanksgiving dinner at our place, but I was fortunately able to dissuade her. Even if we do have a dining room table that extends far enough for six people, we don't have six chairs to put at it. Besides, I said, nothing really says "home" like every room having at least one big box of stuff that hasn't been unpacked. Heck, the plastic tub in the living room is being used as an ottoman. It doesn't mean anything, other than "we're really lazy and busy and we'll get to it later", but somebody could take it to mean that we're just marking time or something silly like that.<br /><br />I didn't think of that second bit at the time, of course - it was after spending a couple days at Kate's folk's place that it occurred to me that someone might interpret our partially unpacked state as having greater meaning. Kate kind of laughed when I told her that, saying it's a sign that even after four-plus years, I'm still not all girl in my head, but she knew that Friday if she hadn't known already.<br /><br />But I'm getting ahead or behind or whatever. So, anyway, we drove out to the Cape, and had the big Thanksgiving meal: Turkey, stuffing, gravy, mashed potato, and pie. I'm not a really big girl, but I can put away a good holiday meal with the best of them. Mrs. Jensen was kind of amused by that, asking if my appetite was the result of my still thinking like a man on some things. No, I said, I'm pretty aware of what this body can handle by this point. Maybe remembering my first life means I accept that I'll tend to put on a few extra pounds over the winter easier, I guess; I didn't have the same kind of peer pressure to look skinny growing up, even if I did have some other weight issues. But those helped me learn that to recognize when I'm carrying too much and need to buckle down. Besides, I said, the first few pounds I gain tend to settle in the boobs and butt, and people seem to like that. Kate blushed a little at that.<br /><br />Of course, once I wake up from my tryptophan-induced nap, I can groan about how it hurts with the best of them, too. Lisette got a good chuckle out of that when they brought out the leftover pie during a game of Scrabble.<br /><br />Mr. Jensen was more than a bit surprised to see me when he came out for breakfast the next morning and saw me flipping through channels on the TV. "I thought you'd be out shopping with the rest of the girls."<br /><br />Nah, I said. I'd been invited, but I didn't want to potentially make their family activity weird, and, besides, rushed shopping is no fun. I've got a floating holiday left to use this year, so I'll make something up in early December and get stuff done then.<br /><br />"Sounds sensible." Then he laughed, and said he half-thought I was going to give him the "used-to-be-a-guy, don't-like-shopping" thing. I laughed back, and said I used to be a guy and thus know better. Enjoying shopping is all about enjoying what you're shopping for, I figure. I'll spend hours in an electronics shop, or a bookstore, comparing features or browsing first chapters because I like the stuff. A lot of girls like clothes and shoes, so they enjoy looking at those and trying them on. Heck, I enjoy that a lot more now, because I've always liked looking at snazzy looking girls.<br /><br />At that point, I probably would have liked it more if he'd asked why men don't like shopping with their wives and girlfriends, and then I could have said it's because they're not doing anything and all too often, requests for their opinion are traps and traps are no fun, and we'd laugh some more, but that's not what happened.<br /><br />I think it almost was, but then the synapse between the brain cell that processed me saying how I liked looking at pretty girls and the one brain cell with an image of his daughter fired, and he got serious. "You and Kate have been seeing each other for a while. Longer than about she was with half of her boyfriends, at least."<br /><br />"Yeah, I guess so."<br /><br />He sighed again. "We all thought it was just a rebound thing."<br /><br />I didn't know quite how to respond to that. I tried saying I was sorry, but it sounded inappropriate, to say the least.<br /><br />He said it was okay, and that he kind of wished Kate had met the old me. We'd probably be married and he'd be a grandfather by now.<br /><br />I told him I would have liked that, and he said this was probably as close as we were going to get, which was a shame. We played a lot of pool that afternoon, which was fun, but made him a little more melancholy - I think it's something he would have liked doing with Kate's hypothetical boyfriend Martin.<br /><br />Well, at least at first. I think he got pretty cool with Kate's actual girlfriend Martina by the time the ladies returned from their retail assault. Deep down, he's a guy who just really wants his daughter to be happy.<br /><br />The same's true with my mother. We had a good long talk on the phone the other night. Of course, now that <A HREF="http://www.transplantedlife.com/2007/11/domesticity-of-sort.html">we've got a house</A>, she's making noises about coming up for Christmas.<br /><br />Which, I think, would be pretty cool. Although if she and Kate's family are ever around at the same time, it will be very interesting to see what they each think of our relationship.<br /><br />-MartiJasonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08878262302237069963noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5577970.post-66182734308333918002007-11-14T17:08:00.001-05:002007-11-14T17:08:28.817-05:00Domesticity, of a sortI'm almost tempted to just close up shop on this blog, leaving it abandoned like many others. It's been a while since anything has happened to me that most reasonable people would call science fiction. That's probably a good thing for me and the world at large - who wants to think about having one's mind ripped from her body and put somewhere else more than absolutely necessary? - but who wants to write about the minutia of apartment hunting when you've done things that are almost impossible to believe?<br /><br />The funny thing is, even those little ordinary things do wind up tying into the weird stuff every once in a while. Take the finding a new place to live - Kate and I actually wound up finding a single-family house in Cambridge. Apparently the real estate market is still a little soft, and the value of this place went down when its river view wound up blocked by a construction site. Regardless, Kate fell for the place almost immediately - where some might see uneven floors and a distinct paucity of electrical outlets as major inconveniences, Kate thought they added character. Since we knew the next person to see it would probably grab the place (as they probably should have; the rent is only a couple hundred more than what a two-bedroom apartment will run you), Kate was writing out a deposit check right on the kitchen counter while I was counting how many extension cords and surge protectors we'd need.<br /><br />Anyway, once we'd committed to that, there was a lot of moving to do. Boxing up our stuff, and then unboxing it. Once Kate's parents heard "house", they saw a great opportunity to move things from their basement to ours. Even Nat is making noises about shipping some of my old stuff from Seattle, since little Marty gets into everything and, besides, she's looking at moving in with her new boyfriend and having this other guy's stuff around is kind of awkward.<br /><br />Then there's other stuff. Like the post office. Most of my mail comes addressed to Martina Hart , but there's still some stuff that, even three years after I stopped using that name, still gets addressed to "Michelle Garber". What can I say - I'm a little more comfortable having the Victoria's Secret or Avon catalogs be coming to "someone else". Oh, no, I'd never sign up for that!<br /><br />They're probably not going to follow me this time, though, since I'm not filling out change of address cards using Michelle's name. I'm not saying I'll particularly miss them, but I feel kind of weird chipping that much more of "Michelle" out of my life. It's this body's birthday on Sunday, and I don't plan on celebrating it - "my" birthday is February 2nd, and my swap-day is July 19th. Doesn't seem quite right - like I'm erasing every trace that Michelle ever existed.<br /><br />-MartiJasonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08878262302237069963noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5577970.post-66505750475851218532007-10-11T19:55:00.000-04:002007-10-11T19:59:38.565-04:00Living ArrangementsIt looks like I'm going to have to move or find a roommate soon, but for the best of reasons: After serving overseas for as long as I've had reason to be interested, Gertie's boyfriend has finally gotten a transfer stateside. It may not be for long - Gertie says he's going to be working with some people at MIT on a project that they can't really discuss, and once his part is over they might transfer him back to the Gulf - but in the meantime, they want to spend as much time together as possible.<br /><br />And, of course, lay the ground for much more than that. Gertie didn't show up back at our apartment for at least seventy-two hours after going to meet his plane, and I'm pretty sure that was entirely because she was starting to need a shower and change of clothes badly. Somewhere around hour sixty-one, she says, was when Mark popped the question, a totally spontaneous thing once he realized that the long time apart hadn't changed how they felt about each other at all. Gertie said yes immediately, and later confided to me that this was the best way for it to happen - it means she gets to choose her ring.<br /><br />As you might imagine, they're trying to pull a wedding together as quickly as possible (and, yeah, I'm going to get to be a bridesmaid), but in the meantime, they're also moving into an apartment closer to the MIT campus. It's also more convenient for Gertie; she's managed to land a job on the Somerville police force with the promise of being fast-tracked for detective (she finished the last course she needed for the Master's in criminology this summer).<br /><br />Which would leave me with a two-bedroom apartment that I can sort of afford - as in, I can cover the rent all right, but it would leave me with seven hundred dollars less per month in spending money, and I'm not exactly thrilled with the prospect of curtailing my movie, DVD, comic book, and other habits by that amount (setting aside how much more underwear, shoes, and the like cost than what the first thirty years of my life tells me they <I>should</I>...). I was going to have to find a new roommate, a smaller place, or do the logical thing and find an apartment closer to where I work in Waltham - the suburbs aren't quite so expensive as Cambridge. I really didn't want to do that. Once you get out of the city center, you either need a car - which tends to reclaim the money you save from not living in Boston/Cambridge right away - or you need to really think about "how will I get home" if you come into the city for a concert, movie, or anything else. Not the situation I wanted to be in.<br /><br />Or Kate, it turned out. As soon as she stopped squealing about Gertie getting married, she decided that she could use a new roommate as well, and the lease on her place was coming up at the end of October. So, three guesses on what she and I have spent the last few weeks doing? Looking at apartments.<br /><br />Which, in case it's been long enough since the last time you did it, sucks. Half the ones you look at still have people living there and it's not always clear which problems are intrinsic to the place and which go with the slobby tenants (or, even with good tenants, how much needed repair work they're covering up). Some you could only see before work, others after, others during the weekend. The most hilarious thing was when we had two lined up in one night, and one was actually Kate's apartment... and the other was in my building. We passed on those.<br /><br />Ah, well, we've got a couple more weeks. Kate may just wind up moving in with me for a while, although I think she sort of likes sleeping over more than she'd like staying there for any length of time.<br /><br />-MartiJasonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08878262302237069963noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5577970.post-82072814752529772452007-09-05T11:45:00.000-04:002007-09-05T11:46:53.989-04:00Someone's going to pay for thisSamantha Haskins turned out all right. When I first met her, she was a teenager who'd run away from home and was living on the street, hooking up with the wrong guy. She had her body stolen, her mind trapped inside a comatose man for almost a year, but give her credit - where finding out that some three other people had been using her body during that time would have broken some people, Sam took it as a wake-up call, both in terms of how there's bigger things going on than one's own personal problems and not to waste your life being miserable, because someone else can waste it for you.<br /><br />I like her. We don't always see eye to eye, but I admire the heck out of her. She's making something of her life and the assholes who are behind all the mind-switching stuff should leave her the hell alone, especially when she's done nothing worse than become friends with Amy.<br /><br />They'd become friendly enough that they decided to stick together as roommates past the summer. Sam and her friends had found a place in Allston, on the B Line, and it turned out that they had room for one more, which worked out fairly well; Amy could take the 66 bus to Harvard on the days when walking wasn't an option. It's kind of close to where Michelle lived when I woke up with her body, although I haven't actually seen the place yet; Sam's friends had rented a van for Moving Day, so Kate and I were free to visit her folks on the Cape rather than help move.<br /><br />Anyway, the group of them went out for dinner last night when Sam's parents called, saying there was a hitch with one of the financial aid documents, and rather than put it off, Sam went back to the apartment to find what they needed.<br /><br />Only when she got there, she wasn't alone; some guy was going through their still-packed boxes. She said it was like he had a degree in it - there was a pile of boxes that had presumably already been searched, and right next to it he was going through another quickly. He must not have heard Sam come in, but he did hear when she pulled out her phone to dial 911. He ran out quickly, but Sam was blocking her way, and he shoved her aside hard enough for her to break her arm on the radiator.<br /><br />It's just a hairline fracture, but as you might imagine, Sam and Amy are livid. Amy called me from the hospital, and Gertie and I were just barely able to talk her out of buying a gun. Gertie pointed out the statistics on how they're more likely to injure their owners than do any good, but Amy said that wouldn't be a problem - she knew how to handle one. She wasn't sure how, but she'd found herself snickering at how someone on the cop show on the waiting-room TV was handling theirs.<br /><br />Whoever did this, she said, was making a big mistake. She might not be remembering more than bits and pieces, but she was pretty sure that those bits were adding up to someone you did not want to fuck with.<br /><br />-MartiJasonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08878262302237069963noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5577970.post-3273523510019659892007-08-18T17:38:00.000-04:002007-08-18T17:39:09.734-04:00Playing hookyI'd had tickets to a Sox game <A HREF="http://www.transplantedlife.com/2007/04/upgrades_6788.html">back in April</A>, but it got rained out. Rescheduling a ballgame scheduled for a rainy April day to a Friday afternoon in August is trading up, so to speak.<br /><br />Unfortunately, it turned out that Kate couldn't get off work, so I wound up going with Amy. She's had a bit of a rough last couple of weeks; she thinks that as much as Sam says otherwise, the idea that <A HREF="http://www.transplantedlife.com/2007/08/what-we-know.html">Amy might have been one of the people who held her body hostage</A> seems to be making her very nervous.<br /><br />(Boy, my life is bizarre. I have no idea how to describe that.)<br /><br />It was a fun game, and we had pretty good seats. Well, not seats, per se; we were in the standing room section of the right field picnic area. It's a great view, although some of the neighbors left a bit to be desired - it seemed to take a while for the kids apparently there for a birthday party to take an interest in the actual game, as opposed to throwing peanuts at one another.<br /><br />There were also the usual folks who seemed kind of lubricated for a one o'clock start, and disappeared when the beer got cut off in the seventh. Amy stirred the ice in her soda as they walked off, wondering if she had been a drinker in her previous life. She didn't have any particular desire to do so right now, but how much of that was Amy's body and how much was some attitude left over from her previous life? And of course, the past year or so couldn't be forgotten - the Sanadas don't drink much, and getting pretty sick at some party had turned her off to it some as well.<br /><br />So, I said, not having any more <A HREF="http://www.transplantedlife.com/2007/08/but-what-does-it-mean.html">flashes of memory</A>?<br /><br />Not really. She saw her therapist earlier in the week, and told her about blurting Carter's name out, and that got her rewarded with a bunch of memory exercises that didn't seem to be doing much good. She seemed encouraged, though - ever since we'd found out that her amnesia was due to a physical trauma, they'd been worried that the memory was simply impossible to recover, like paper files that had been burned rather than misfiled. Amy's still worried that that might be the case - after all, there's no reason why it has to be all or nothing; some might be gone and some might just be missing.<br /><br />Anyway, the Sox won, and we went our separate ways after.<br /><br />I'll write more tomorrow - I've got tickets for tonight's game, as well, and this time Kate <I>can</I> make it.<br /><br />-MartiJasonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08878262302237069963noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5577970.post-87389623050542723912007-08-06T11:58:00.000-04:002007-08-06T12:00:06.607-04:00What we knowIn short, not much.<br /><br />I'm sort of starting to wonder what I ever saw in Carter; it took him a couple of days to get back to me after I called him Wednesday to tell him about <A HREF="http://www.transplantedlife.com/2007/08/but-what-does-it-mean.html">Amy calling Sam by his name</A>. Now, the delay probably isn't totally unreasonable; he was under a deadline crunch and I don't suppose everybody has to really prioritize finding out the whos, hows, and whys of us being made into who and what we are now. It's important to remember that Carter 3.0 is a different person than the guy I met four years ago, just as I'm not the same person Martin 1.0 was.<br /><br />Still, this is big news. Even if he feels that that part of his life is a closed book, it would have been cool of him to pitch in a little faster, if he could.<br /><br />He didn't have a lot to say. He was a prisoner during his first few months as Sam, and then once he <A HREF="http://www.transplantedlife.com/2004/04/didnt-feel-comfortable-posting-last.html">escaped</A>, he was fanatical about not letting anybody know. Even Maureen was kept in the dark until he <A HREF="http://www.transplantedlife.com/2004/11/no-pleasure-in-being-right.html">bolted</A> to switch into my old body.<br /><br />We were sitting at one of the tables outside Grafton Street in Harvard Square when he told us this on Sunday - me, Carter, Amy and Sam. Amy had to be more than a little disappointed to hear this, but she barely blinked at it. She pulled a notebook and a pen out of her bag, and then snorted a little. "Did you know anybody who tended to make lists?"<br /><br />Carter laughed at that. "No, not really."<br /><br />"Worth a shot. I'm going to make a list anyway, though; it helps me."<br /><br />"Well, I suppose you could start with the people who read Marti's blog."<br /><br />"It's not like I ever posted pictures!"<br /><br />"No, but Carter's right." Sam chewed on her lip a little. "Someone could have known about your blog but not told you, and thus known that the person in my body wasn't me, even if they didn't let on."<br /><br />Amy made an "ugh" sound. The only other people Carter had told were the FBI, but the people working on our case get tested on a fairly regular basis - if someone's body had been compromised in the past year, we'd have found out.<br /><br />"So who's left?"<br /><br />We all knew the answer to Sam's question, but none of us wanted to say it. Amy did.<br /><br />"How many people were in on kidnapping you?" she asked Carter. "It can't have just been the two that are dead. They had some contact with Korpin, and maybe people in their organization had seen pictures."<br /><br />Sam's eyes got wide. "You can't think--"<br /><br />"I can't eliminate it. Right now, the most likely answer is that I was one of the bad guys."<br /><br />"But--"<br /><br />I interrupted. "She's right. That makes the most sense. BUT, even if it's true... We're new people, Amy more than most. If she was part of Korpin's organization, she hasn't been for a year. And even if she starts remembering things, that doesn't meant he way she acts will change."<br /><br />"Right." I don't know if Amy really believes that, but she kind of has to.<br /><br />-MartiJasonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08878262302237069963noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5577970.post-56108844759660157832007-08-01T08:55:00.000-04:002007-08-01T08:56:36.763-04:00But what does it mean?Some people would ascribe my jumpiness at work yesterday to knowing something big was going to happen, but that's bull. Omens are connections we make after the fact in most cases; in others its the willful ignorance that you've been antsy before and nothing important happened. The reality is that I had had a new job shoved to the top of my to-do queue with the actual doing being slowed down by the person who requested it calling every fifteen minutes to see how I was doing. He'd probably be annoyed if he knew that I already wasn't fully concentrating because I was refreshing <A HREF="http://www.redsox.com">RedSox.com</A> in another window to see if they had made a trade.<br /><br />It did get done, in the end, but it took all day and then some, so I had to catch the 6:00 bus out of Waltham instead of the 5:30, and though it seems like an hour should be enough time to get from there to Coolidge Corner, it's not, so I had a cranky Kate waiting for me at the theater when I showed up fifteen minutes late for the seven o'clock show of <I>Rescue Dawn</I>.<br /><br />"Sorry, Kate, I had--"<br /><br />"Werner Herzog in the jungle."<br /><br />"The guy needed it for a presentation--"<br /><br /><I>"WERNER HERZOG IN THE JUNGLE!"</I><br /><br />"Tomorrow night, I promise. I'll skip the comic shop."<br /><br />That mollified her a bit. After all, it's not actually important that I get the new comics the day they come out; it's just a habit thing. I'm only half-kidding when I say that everyone should cultivate a few habits like that, since they make great bargaining chips, at least in minor situations like this.<br /><br />Anyway, she was satisfied, so we went across the street to J.P. Lick's to have some ice cream, where we bumped into Sam and Amy... Who had just seen <I>Rescue Dawn</I> and were raving about it. Amy asked if the Sox had done anything cool, and I mentioned Eric Gagne. That led to a long conversation about whether or not they should have given up Gabbard, whether the minor league outfielder they sent along was more valuable than Wily Mo Pena (whom they hadn't been able to trade), and so on. Not your typical girl talk, I guess, although this is Boston - the Red Sox are are everybody's talk.<br /><br />The exact details of the conversation aren't that important - Sam said she was sick of seeing "Whiffy Mo" strike out, if you're curious. It was the way Amy answered: "C'mon, Carter, at least strikeouts aren't double plays."<br /><br />The whole table fell silent, and Amy looked at us like we were nuts. "Well, they aren't. Back me up on this, Marti."<br /><br />At that moment, I had completely forgotten what the point he'd made seconds before was. Amy looked at me like I'd lost my mind when I said nothing.<br /><br />Sam was the first one able to talk. "Yeah, right, double plays, whatever. Who cares? <I>You just called me Carter!</I>"<br /><br />It took a second for this to register with Amy, but then the enormity of it hit her. Sure, she knew that my ex-boyfriend had been switched with Sam at one point, but that was just knowledge. For her to actually use Carter's name... That had to come from experience.<br /><br />I immediately whipped out my cell phone to try and talk to him (what can I say; I never purge my contact list of potentially useful names), but he wasn't answering him. I promised Amy that I'd pick his brain at the office today - even if we don't work at the same location, the phone systems are connected.<br /><br />We're all a little excited - there's little more frustrating than having a mystery on your hands and not being able to find any clues whatsoever. Of course, I'd be lying if I said we weren't also a little scared, Amy in particular. She doesn't talk about it much, but ever since <A HREF="http://www.transplantedlife.com/2006/12/i-want-them-out-of-my-head-now.html">she learned that she really had been someone else</A>, she's always been a little nervous about the person she'd been before - what if that someone wasn't a good person?<br /><br />As much as she hates not having a past, she's not quite sure she likes <A HREF="http://www.transplantedlife.com/2007/02/local-action.html">bits of one</A> breaking through to who she is now.<br /><br />-MartiJasonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08878262302237069963noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5577970.post-29849258834970199082007-07-21T23:10:00.000-04:002007-07-22T00:11:12.486-04:00The sort of vacation you have to rest up fromI didn't intend to go nearly a month without writing here; it just sort of happened. I'm not going to apologize for it; everyone needs a vacation, especially after the inevitable crunch of work that has to be done before heading out. Plus there was Eloise's birthday party, then the fourth of July cookout up at Kate's folks before heading back to Boston for fireworks, then catching a flight north...<br /><br />The festivals were great, although we ran ourselves ragged the first few days darting between Concordia University, where the Fantasia screenings are, and Place des Arts, where most of the Jazz Festival events took place. We thought of doing some things at the Just for Laughs Festival, but a lot of it was in French, and I would have lagged far behind her.<br /><br />Then back here, and my birthday. We went bowling, and I did not acquit myself well. Now, I'm not saying I was really good in my previous life, but I didn't stink. Still, four years like this, and I still occasionally find myself trying to do things the way I remember doing them. By the end of the night, I stopped trying to lift the heavier balls, and eventually realized that they were going to drift a bit since I couldn't throw them quite as hard, but if I'm going to do this again, I'll have to relearn how.<br /><br />My life in a nutshell.<br /><br />-MartiJasonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08878262302237069963noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5577970.post-78950119685876085112007-06-26T14:01:00.001-04:002007-06-26T14:01:56.423-04:00Vacation planningAnother year, another trip to Montreal with a new lover.<br /><br />Obviously, it's going to be a little different this year. For starters, Kate wants to catch a fair amount of the <A HREF="http://www.montrealjazzfest.com/Fijm2007/splash.aspx">Montreal Jazz Festival</A> as well as the <A HREF="http://www.fantasiafestival.com">Fantasia Festival</A>. I'm okay with that - I usually get kind of sick of horror movies by the end of my week and a half there. Not that that's all that plays, but it's a big plurality if not a majority, and there's only so many zombies and serial killers you can watch before you're numb to it.<br /><br />We're looking to have a lot of fun over the next few weeks. Friday is the <A HREF="http://www.transplantedlife.com/2006/07/i-am-wiped.html">first birthday</A> of Jen's daughter Eloise, so we've all been invited out to their place for a little party on Saturday. Ellie's adorable, so we had a good time shopping for presents. She obviously won't understand what the big deal is, especially since she's the center of attention no matter what; a party's no different.<br /><br />We were looking through cards when Kate smirked and held up a card with a big number four on it. "<A HREF="http://www.transplantedlife.com/2003/07/okay.html">Someone else</A> is having a birthday soon, too."<br /><br />"It's no big deal; I have one every four months."<br /><br />"Yeah, I know, but that's the one where you became <I>you</I>. That's important to me."<br /><br />I told her that was sweet, and almost kissed her, but there was this older woman close by, which puts a bit of a damper on public displays of affection. I'm starting to fear - just a bit - that she's planning something.<br /><br />She is good at planning things, though - better than I am. She handled booking flights, hotel rooms, tickets to the things at the Jazz Festival that require tickets. It is absolutely driving her nuts that as of right now, Fantasia's website isn't even showing a list of films, much less a schedule, despite the fact that the festival opens in a mere nine days. How is she supposed to plan things around that?<br /><br />I tell her that it's okay to run a vacation by the seat of one's pants, but she says that whenever she's tried to do that, it's been a disaster - trying to go places that will be closed for the next year and a half, sitting around waiting for openings when she could have booked in advance and done more, finding out after she got home that there was something really cool she would have liked to do. I said it's worked out okay for me, so maybe between us it will be all right. Besides, I pointed out, some of that stuff's going to be weather-dependent anyway, and it's not like she can control that.<br /><br />Though I get the idea that she's thinking she should be able to.<br /><br />- MartiJasonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08878262302237069963noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5577970.post-75344752719052396012007-06-17T20:33:00.000-04:002007-06-17T20:34:51.942-04:00One for her, one for me.For someone who always thinks in terms of winning and losing, enjoying both the movie you picked and the one your girlfriend picked to see on a Saturday afternoon can seem better that both enjoying both. I like to think I'm not that girl and wasn't that guy. Hopefully the worst I can be accused of is not feeling bad enough when that happens in my favor and grumbling a little when it doesn't.<br /><br />It was pretty much almost guaranteed to work out that way yesterday afternoon, given the movie choices. Kate's been wanting to see <I>Paris, je t'aime</I> for a while, and I've pretty much been on board, just trying to find the time. That was first choice going into the weekend, and, heck, might have gone down as my choice - although I had an irrational interest in seeing the new <I>Fantastic Four</I> movie despite the aggressive mediocrity of the previous one - until the Weinstein Company decided to do stupid booking tricks with <I>DOA: Dead or Alive</I>.<br /><br />I know, I should probably turn in my membership card for the local <A HREF="http://www.chlotrudis.org/">independent film club</A> for having the slightest interest in that - it's not like I ever even played the game. But, damn it, I figured that something with Corey Yuen directing and doing the fight scenes has to be worth something, and TWC handled it in a way that got my contrarian streak going. Most people, when they see a film delayed for almost a year and then only released in a few theaters just outside the city, get the message that it sucks and should be ignored; I get pissed off that it's being kept from me.<br /><br />That's what happened here; the closest that the movie was playing was Revere, which requires taking two MBTA buses end to end. So, yeah, not a film I can easily see after work during the week, which means either ditching Kate during the weekend or dragging her along. She agreed to the latter.<br /><br />It helped that <I>Paris, je t'aime</I> put her in a good mood. We wound up liking different segments; I got a real kick out of the Vincenzo Natali bit with the vampires and Christopher Doyle's nigh-incomprehensible (but pretty) short; she liked Wes Craven's visit to Oscar Wilde's grave and Gerard Depardieu's piece with Gena Rowlands and Ben Gazzara (so, basically, she liked the talky ones and I liked the eye candy). We were both really glad the film ended with Alexander Payne's piece, narrated in halting, American-accented French which she says does the best job of conveying the effect Paris has on a visitor. I told her I had to take her word for it, as I'd never been, and she said I absolutely had to... Although we (her pronoun) might be better off waiting until the dollar isn't in such bad shape relative to the Euro and politics change so that France falls back in love with America again.<br /><br />(The love-hate thing between our two nations is pretty fascinating; Kate spent the entire bus ride between Central Square, Cambridge and Linden Square, Revere going off on how astonishing it was that we managed to get them to hate us post-9/11)<br /><br />Kate put up with <I>DOA</I> like a trouper. Part of it was the theater; as much as any of us Lovers Of Film will tell you that the great theaters are the old-school single screen places whose lobbies display photographs of the marquee from when <I>Casablanca</I> played there, it's also nice to go to a place with 19 screens, all with digital sound and stadium seating. (A mixed blessing - it means you're never looking at the back of someone's head, but ask Kate about how the audience is supposed to look up at the screen rather than see it head-on sometime.) Oh, and where the concession stand also has satellites dedicated to Ben & Jerry's, Nathan's Hamburgers, Sbarro pizza, pretzels... I was kind of surprised not to find a Dunkin Donuts, but then I always am; I believe that donuts and donut holes are the ideal movie food - minimum noisy packaging, no crunching noise, generally filling - and can't understand why theater owners haven't twigged to that yet.<br /><br />Anyway, theater nice, movie dumb. Dumb fun, if you ask me, though Kate will say just dumb. She doesn't love the martial arts genre as I do - even down to the people who are amusingly miscast in it (Eric Roberts? What the hell?). I apologized to her a lot. I have a feeling I may be dragged to <I>Once</I> to atone.<br /><br />We went out to dinner afterward, and she was rather amused by my putting my hands on my ears whenever someone nearby was talking about the ballgame. I was recording it, after all, because it looked to be a good one.<br /><br />We watched it at my place later that evening, after breaking out the Scrabble set. She grumbled a bit about that, just because she wanted to make sure that the trouncing I war receiving was the result of me not having her vocabulary and ability to spot good positions, as opposed to me being distracted by Matsuzaka's gem. Still, she said it was cute - that when I loved something, I wanted all of it - the tension, the little details, the stuff that doesn't really look exciting to an outsider. After all, I could just check the score on the web, but that's just going through the motions, and sublimating passion to convenience, and who wants that?<br /><br />She may not have been talking about baseball, there.<br /><br />-MartiJasonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08878262302237069963noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5577970.post-72693941098954118612007-06-05T23:29:00.000-04:002007-06-05T23:30:12.951-04:00Moving DaySeptember First is <B>Moving Day</B> in Greater Boston; it seems like almost every lease runs September to August. Since there's so many people in this city whose lives are tied up in academics, either as students, professors, staff, it makes sense for most people to plan their moves around the start of the academic year.<br /><br />The same thing applies to the end of the academic year, too, as people clear out of dorms and often try to find some place for summer, either because they're going to be back on campus in the fall, or their lease doesn't start until then. Then there's all the people who go home for the summer and are looking to sublet.<br /><br />Amy's still trying to line a place up for fall, but since she's going to be sticking around here this summer - taking some classes, auditing one that she's already down as passing, working - a sublet is better than nothing. I was actually able to help her find it - <A HREF="http://www.transplantedlife.com/2006/09/fancy-meeting-you-here.html">Samantha Haskins</A> found a place near B.U. with a June-to-May lease, but her roommate wouldn't be able to join her until September, so she called me and asked if I knew anybody. Yeah, I said, I do, and gave Amy a call.<br /><br />Sam was actually pretty excited about this development - she's always been a little awkward around me, both because I sort of see the other people who were in her body when I look at her and because I wasn't necessarily sure it was right for Carter to switch people in and out of bodies against their wills, even if doing so restored her. I'm not unhappy that that has happened, but I don't know if I can do it. The other thing is that while both of us have been through some pretty strange stuff, she doesn't know what it's like to remember being someone else - her time out-of-body was spent in a coma. She is, in her own way, just as driven to know what happened as any of us - she sees it as someone stealing a year of her life - but since her experience is so different from mine and Carter's, she doesn't really feel much kinship with us. She sees it as having a year of missing time followed by a bunch of awkward questions about her sexuality.<br /><br />She and Amy are in a much more similar position - about the same age, both aware that some part of their life was taken from them, but not able to access it. Hopefully things will work out for them.<br /><br />We did the actual moving on Saturday, which was no fun, what with the rain. Amy was pretty easy; she didn't have much stuff, and most of it was stuffed in boxes in a corner of mine & Gertie's apartment. Sam, on the other hand, had done a good job of scrounging furniture off craigslist and from various folks she knew moving out of their places, so Kate & I wound up taking Jen's truck all around town because this person had a bed, this one a sofa, this one a coffee table...<br /><br />After a couple hours Kate and I were starting to seriously question the not having boyfriends thing. As much as I remember hating to lug stuff around, I certainly hate it more now. We grunted at Amy about not at least stringing Akira along for a while, but she said she didn't see this coming.<br /><br />Sam had no excuse.<br /><br />We got them moved in, though, which is the important thing. Hopefully they'll be good for each other (and Gertie and I can have a little more free space).<br /><br />-MartiJasonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08878262302237069963noreply@blogger.com2