nooneisdangerous-blog

[nooneisdangerous-blog]

Woah, man. I stepped on the scale this morning and found 198 looking back at me. Just four months ago, at 260, I was pretty sure I'd never see my high school weight of 225 ever again. Now I'm nearly 30 pounds under what I was when I was 18! I can't honestly remember the last time I was under 200 (maybe a pre-teen? I was a pretty big chubber!) This has me excited to hit the 180 mark (currently on day 4 of a 30 day juice and raw salad bender!) by late November. Fingers crossed!

[nooneisdangerous-blog]

No real updates lately, other than my hair looks super rad today!

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[nooneisdangerous-blog]

This last week has been a mixture of a lot of things. Coming out as pangender has been the big thing for me after so many years of playing around with the semantics of how to address it and what to label it as and call it. The support has been there, for the most part, with the occasional exception where a person thinks it's unfathomable or another person suggests that I go by the pronoun "it" instead of the chosen their/them/they. 

Aside from that slight tinge of unease that came with outing myself, I've felt so comfortable and wonderful walking around, knowing that I can do whatever I want and not have to adhere to some gender binary. There's a marked freedom in that, the ability to be whoever I want without fear of reprisal, kept in the knowledge that it's not my problem if select individuals don't understand. I can't think for anyone else, only myself. There's empowerment in that.

My weight loss has been continuing at a steady clip. I'm mere pounds away from hitting the 200 mark. When I started juicing three months ago, I was at 260 pounds and by the BMI calculators, "morbidly" obese. Now I'm no longer obese at all - according to that same calculator, I'm still 'overweight' but it feels good to be that and not what I once was. I'm working towards hitting the 160 mark by the end of the year, square in the middle of the calculator's 'normal weight' range. Once I get to the halfway point at 180, I intend on rewarding myself by shaving the sides of my head and having a floppy mohawk dyed bright blue like something you'd see on Rihanna. 

Despite all of the positive changes that have been going on in my life, I still feel this heavy pall hanging over everything. I can feel myself pulling inward, inching at an increasingly accelerated clip away from everyone. These days, my home is the only place where I feel comfortable, where I feel that I can be left alone without worry of being pulled aside for a fifteen minute conversation every several blocks. It's been this way for nearly a year, but over the last few months, it's been amplified. I can't even step outside of the my home for twenty minutes without having my name called by atleast two or three different people. I acknowledge how arrogant that sounds, but I'm not particularly bragging about it; it's something I can't stand. 

Prior to Notes and Bolts, I was anonymous. No one knew who I was and I could move around wherever I wanted and be left unbothered. Now I can't even walk down to the record store or the sandwich shop without having to sit through someone wanting to talk. Sometimes I deal with it with a smile and a thin veil of seeming authenticity, but most of the time, my skin is crawling and I just want to get out of wherever I am as quickly as possible. I've taken to wearing sunglasses when I'm outside, even in the middle of the night, because while it's not a very good disguise, I can atleast make the excuse that I didn't see someone well enough to make eye contact if I happen to walk past without saying something. 

I know that I sound terribly misanthropic right now. I love people, I truly do; but these days I can't tell which ones want to be my friend versus the ones that just want something. One friend has expressed the desire to be there for me during my down moments but then turns around to mutual friends and complains about decisions I'm making. Always keep the awareness in the back of yr mind that no matter how much you believe a person deserves yr trust, they will *always* have an agenda that, if the situation calls for it, will trump any notion of 'friendship' that you think the two of you have. Their personal interests and pursuits will always override whatever it is you may think they have with you or you with them. It all feels so incredibly two faced and contradictory.

Sometimes I wonder what would happen if I just shut down my social media outlets, pulled the plug on Notes and Bolts, and went back undercover; squirreled away in low profile neighborhoods walking dogs for a living while collecting action figures and comic books and keeping to myself. In some ways, I miss that - atleast then I could count the number of true friends I had who I knew wouldn't say one thing to my face and then something else elsewhere. When I go out on weekends, I deliberately choose the most obscure spots in the city where I'm almost positive no one who knows me would hang out. This all sounds so incredibly egotistic, and I don't begrudge you, Tumblr, for thinking that of me if you do. I'm no celebrity, but I'm not just some random person anymore, either. Sometimes having the position that I do is tasking on so many levels, that I can barely see the good that comes of any of it. 

I wish Winter would get here so I could atleast have an excuse to never leave the house.

[nooneisdangerous-blog]

Saturday afternoon.

Downtown on Michigan Avenue.

The Water Tower Place mall. 

I'm standing in the middle of Sephora and for the first time in my life, I'm not a spectator waiting patiently for another person to make their purchase. No, this time I accompany no one in their quest, this time stepping foot into the downtown Chicago branch of the brightly lit make up and beauty franchise for a mission that's all my own. I initially had a laser sharp focus on finding and possessing a tube of emerald green lipstick but found myself sorely disappointed when not only did the store not have the color in stock, but that I also - to my own sobering horror - looked like a cross between a clown and an overzealous Cure fan when I made a concession for the runner up color of blue and painted it across my bottom lip. As I hastily wiped the matter from my mouth, I muttered curses beneath my breath at TLC for leading me to believe that blue lipstick could look cool on anybody; a conclusion I'd come to from watching the "Creep" music video on MTV far too many times at the beyond impressionable age of 9.

Turning my attention instead towards an entire aisle awash in fields of eyeliner pencils of every possible shade imaginable, I could feel my hands begin to shake as my fingers slowly glided across the various shades of green, plucking each variant sample pencil from its perch one by one and inspecting the colour contained within. Many of the shades were rife with glitter, an accoutrement that I had little interest in adopting into my look. I finally settled upon an iridescent shade that struck my eye as remarkably similar to the emerald that I held in my mind's eye when looking for the lipstick, now in absentia.

Shuffling slowly towards the counter where a well lit mirror was situated, alongside boxes of tissue and makeup remover, I set to work slowly tracing the sample pencil beneath my right eye. I did my best to ignore the puzzled looks of the more traditionally masculine fellows as they passed by the station, invisible chains held by their girlfriends rattling like unseen iron whimpers amidst the soundtrack of throbbing electronic music, staring at me in bewilderment and likely thinking up silent curses in the minds. Inspecting the job closely as my reflection peered back at me, I found satisfaction in the line of metallic green as it sat juxtaposed against the pupil and iris positioned above it. After several more moments of inspection, I gave myself the go ahead to add a line to the space below my left eye, and upon finishing, leaned closer in once more towards the looking glass to scrutinize the finished product.

As I placed the cap back onto the pencil, I looked around, trying as best as possible to conceal my nervousness, attempting to balance it with the elation I could feel as I kept reminding myself that I wasn't getting away with anything elicit, much as I felt like what I was doing was, infact, swimming sharply against a very well defined and long established taboo. Males wearing eyeliner is nothing new, of course; since the days of Little Richard, since the days of the Egyptian Pharaohs, since the first day that Brett Michaels first sauntered down Sunset Strip baptized in Aquanet and gussied in blush - this act is hardly a revolutionary one. All of this to say that what I was doing looked bizarre enough to the more conservative ilk, save for the private truth that I am, infact, not a male at all beyond my biological sex organs. To anyone else in this store, I am a glam rocker, I am a homosexual, I am a faggot. I am any number of things - many of them spoken as pejoratives to this client base composed largely of upper middle class females dragging their boyfriends, clad in attire blaring the logos of their favorite sports teams, around each and every aisle, agonizing over every detail of their bone structure, and making their company groan in agony as they check team scores on their iPhones and wish that they could just leave this place that, in its loud and bustling nature, with its collage of neon lights, perfumed smells mixing and mingling to the ceilings and onward to the skies to the heavens, looks less like a retail outlet and more like the setting of a Human League music video.

I moved past the suffering manly men and the preening womanly women and found Mellie, gleefully showing her my find like a child in a toy store after having found the White Whale that they'd spent so long seeking. As she inspected the eyeliner, I could feel my skin popping and shimmering, alight with the excitement and possibility held by the tiny item in her hands. Making the purchase at the checkout counter, I timidly made Mellie slip my debit card across the customer/employee chasm, listening intently to the sliding of the plastic along the smooth white surface, and trying my best not to make eye contact with the bald and heavily tattooed person who accepted the card and item and slipped the second of those into a small and very fancy bag before silently handing the card back. Maybe I was afraid of the judgement of him seeing the evidence of the eyeliner across my face, that my female partner was not the one purchasing the product, but I; the person who to him and everyone else in this store, just looked like a faggy boy.

Buying eyeliner isn't an earth shattering achievement, but it was the first in a long line of small and simple - nay, even inconsequential - acts that I'm taking as I traverse this road where I very deliberately straddle a line that I've straddled for practically my entire life, but this time, with the considered frame of mind that knows full well what it is I'm doing and who I am. This act wasn't in the same league as when I was 15 years old and in my redneck infested hometown's mall purchasing eyeliner sheepishly from the Claire's and hoping the teenaged girl on the other side of the counter didn't tell all of her friends later and make me the butt of a never ending stream of jokes. When I was buying those things, I was a boy; a teenaged male insecure in who he was, trying as best as possible to compute the compulsions of femininity while being told at every turn that each inclination was perverse, unnatural, and wrong.

Now, I'm simply a person, empowered by every small act, no matter how superficial. Not a he, nor a she, but a they. A them. A their. A human. I possess no gender, despite my binary, and while no one in Sephora knew that, I found myself taking comfort, knowing that I had a strength that I'd never possessed; even if, for now, that strength was willingly applying a sample of make up onto myself without regard for who may have been watching.

I can't wait until I need to go buy another stick.

[nooneisdangerous-blog]

[nooneisdangerous-blog]

Today, after years of trying to figure out how to quantify the entire burning farm of feelings, thoughts, and everything in between into words, I came out via Facebook as pangendered.

What is pangendered, you ask? At a casual glance, it looks like pangea, or panda danger, or endangered panda pangea. Often confused with pansexual, which is a state of attraction to all genders and everything in between; pangender is a state of being where the person assuming the title feels discomfort with aligning themselves between either of the choices provided in the two party binary system - Male and Female. 

To quote that bizarre openly Democratic system of random factoids known as Wikipedia: "Pangender people are those who do not wish to be labeled as female or male in gender, as they feel that they do not fit into binary genders because they feel they are all genders. The term has a great deal of overlap with genderqueer and is used by those in the LGBT community meaning "all genders.""

There has, of course, been much debate as to the semantics and key differences between the use and differentiation of labels such as pangender, genderqueer, and gender fluid, with many adherents to each title insisting that these three designations, in particular, have wide and mountainous variances that put them each in a separate park. I'm not sure where that puts me, but here's my opening shot heard across the land of Zuckerberg:

"I'm going to go ahead and put this out there in a public manner after countless years of private deliberation and thought and questioning - and if you feel the need to cut off ties with me, you are more than welcome to, though, I would prefer to retain the friendship of all of you: I am pangender.  This has raised questions to a few that I have spoken privately to about this, though to most who know me in a closer way, this shouldn't be a surprise at all. What is pangender? Most equate it to the trans category of which this is not. In short, pangender is the eschewing largely of identification with either of the two hard binary genders. I've never since I've been able to re-collect things from childhood been comfortable fully as a male, but at the same time, have never had a desire to identify as female, despite largely taking influence and queues from feminine sources. Consequently, I've always felt comfortable somewhere in the middle. Biologically, I am still a male, of course - but 'gender' and 'sex' are two separate things. The relationship I've been in for quite some time is still very much intact and this is not a sexual thing at all - just a coming to terms with who I am and that I cannot subscribe to a hard binary gender code now, nor have I ever been able to (maybe it started when I found, at the age of 4, that out of the entire cast of the 60's Batman series, Julie Newmar was the one I idolized the most). In reality, this changes very little, if nothing at all, in how I view my friendships and relationships with people. My only request is that those of you are respectful enough to do so, please refer to me in terms of "they", "their", "them", etc. I understand how this adjustment will likely take years as I've spent my life going by "he", "him", etc, despite my near constant discomfort with it (I took on the spelling "Kriss" in early high school due to distaste for the more male derived "Christopher" I was given at birth). This has been fairly difficult for me to write out, partially because it's so very public and because there's a part of me that's genuinely worried that there will be some who will now view me as some kind of freak. I certainly hope that's not the case, though I except that as it comes in the event that it does. This has been a source of struggle, in particular, over the last several weeks, as I've come to realize that I need to embrace and accept this after so long trying to ignore it - for those of you whom I've been short or testy with, I apologize. Now you know why. Thanks for reading, and thanks for being rad!"

-----

For now, we'll let that short transmission suffice as laying the basic ground rules for what is considered pangender; or at the very least, what *I* consider to be pangender. Granted, I've spent my entire life trying to figure out why I've never felt fully comfortable in my own male assigned skin while never having the desire to traverse the roads of full on female reproach - so this is all very new to me in terms of labels, politics and politik, and all of the in betweens that come with being an individual beneath this banner. The only thing I do know is that I've felt an immense relief over the last 24 hours in the time that I've officially made my new path known - it's probably the lightest I've felt in years. And the most excited.

More thoughts and experiences as they become available.

[nooneisdangerous-blog]

[nooneisdangerous-blog]

the only thoughts that have been able to go through my head today have been the ones where i acknowledge that i completely hate myself. i don't post about this stuff on facebook because of the countless people who will see it, so i put it here on tumblr where no one will see it. self hatred really doesn't go away with age and maturity, i guess.

[nooneisdangerous-blog]

i seriously feel like i'm having a near impossible time connecting with everyone, these days.

[nooneisdangerous-blog]

30 Day Juice Project - Day 7

I realized that I accidentally skipped yesterday. Too many projects that I'm juggling. It's almost funny, at this point.

Trying really hard to crack that 200 pound mark - hoping to hit that point in the next week and a half!

Thinking about bringing the tomato soup juice back but I kinda wanna see if my green and red juice can sustain me through the full 30 days. We'll see.

To day 8!

[nooneisdangerous-blog]

30 Day Juice Project - Day 5

New goal is to fit back into my Night of The Living Dead hoodie comfortably. Right now, I can zip it up easier than I have in years, but it's still a tiny bit snug.

Getting there!

Onward to Day 6!

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30 Day Juice Project - Day 4

As of this morning, I'm at 210. I'm down 50 pounds, but have another 45 left to go (new goal weight is 165). If I can peel off a further 20 to get to 190 by the end of this cleanse, I'll be pretty happy. I know most folks shoot for way more, but I'm trying to be fairly realistic given how much I managed to drop in the first 30 days of the 60 day cleanse I just finished. Nonetheless, if I get down to that 190, dropping the final 25 over the next three months before the New Year would be considerably simpler, assuming the plateaus I hit aren't too problematic to get over. 

While the fat comment from yesterday stings a good bit, it's provided unmeaning fuel for me to keep going at this. I don't think I've weighed 210 since early high school - it's arguable that I've not been this weight since I was maybe 15 or 16. That target goal of 190? I'm fairly sure that I've NEVER weighed that little while at my current height (I was always chubby growing up) - being "slim" for the first time in my life is definitely a cool reality, but haters will do their diligence no matter what, I guess.

Onward to Day 5!

[nooneisdangerous-blog]

The picture above was taken this past Sunday.

Today, on the other hand, I was called fat.

So I guess I still have a ways to go? I’d stick my fingers down my throat but there aren’t any solids to throw up, anyway.

Onward to Day (6)4!

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30 Day Juice Project - Day 2

I'm thinking I need to go and get my bike tuned up. It squeaks terribly and I'm pretty sure I need to replace the wheels, since I seem to constantly be putting air into them to no benefit. Riding on a halfway broken down bike DOES do wonders for my legs, however; seriously, I get off of the seat and my legs feel like they're on fire - all of the extra exertion to keep the bike going, I guess.

I'm gonna start a new batch of kombucha today. I'm down to less than a gallon of my previous batch and now that Mellie and I will be sharing it, I can't see it sticking around for long. Today's just busy, in general; the new Pink Frost record that Notes and Bolts and BLVD just dropped a couple of days got written up on Pitchfork so there's buzz around that, and then I have to get downtown in a few hours to guest on Radio One Chicago on WLUW. Go listen to me and Lakshmi at 7:00 (www.wluw.org) 

Days like this, I guess I'm glad that I'm juicing; the stuff is there in the fridge and waiting for me, so there's no thought at all about what to consume.

Onward to Day 3!

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30 Day Juice Project - Day 1

It's like a mini sequel!

No sooner do I wrap up the 60 day cleanse last Thursday, do I now turn around today, less than a week later, to dive right back in for another 30 more! 

My reasoning is two fold - the first, of course, is that I still have some weight to drop, as I've written about previously. The second, is that Mellie is trying her hand at a juice cleanse, and it only makes sense to do it alongside her for support and encouragement. To be honest, after 60 days of doing this, 30 more doesn't seem like the worst prospect. Dropping 25+ more pounds by the beginning of October is also a nice perk!

So, with that, here I go again!

Onward to day 2!

[nooneisdangerous-blog]

i cannot.