Back Home at Last

[child_of_the_air]

Yesterday evening, I returned home after a two-and-a-half week trip to New England and New York to see friends and chosen family.  It was a long, enjoyable, and exhausting trip.  And it generated a few things I wish I'd managed to post about in real time:


Solstice Vigil

While I was in Boston, my friend Hedge invited me to a Solstice vigil at their apartment.  I cooked Innsmouth Holiday Fish Stew (from Ruthanna Emrys' Innsmouth Legacy books) and led a group reading of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, which tells the story of the abduction of Persephone and Demeter's search for her daughter.  

I'm really glad I got to attend, as it was a really good experience for me.  I really enjoyed getting to do pagan-ish things with people, even if it was a bit light on the ritual, and it makes me want to try to find a pagan community of some sort here, although I have my doubts about whether I will be able to find one I'm comfortable with.  It also makes me wonder if I should try to go  to services at my two local UU churches to see if either of them seems to work for me.

The vigil--which was almost entirely trans--was also one of several opportunities I had to meet a bunch of cool trans people on this trip, which was certainly a nice touch. 


Apparently I got a polycule for Yule?

When Jan and I started dating a bit over a year ago, we were both very clear that we wanted it to be an open relationship, even though it didn't seem plausible that we'd manage to actually be practically poly.  However, this fall, Jan met a really cool autistic trans woman named Fina (who sometimes goes by "Lemur" online, amusingly) at her trans support group and they started dating.  During my visit, I got to meet her in person twice, and we ended up cuddling a bunch each time.  And then, as I was on my way to my next stop after leaving Boston, she sent me an adorably awwwtistic email asking me to be her girlfriend, and I said yes!

That would be exciting enough news, but I also met a neat autistic trans woman (can you see a pattern here?) named Izzy Vivian at the trains trans meetup some friends and I organized while I was in Boston.  We ended up cuddling a lot and in a confusing probably-dating entanglement.  On Christmas Eve, Jan, Fina, Izzy Vivian, and I hung out for a long time in a coffeeshop talking and hugging a bunch, and it was a really wonderful experience.  Now I suppose I have even more people to bug me about visiting Boston more often than I did last year.


Anticlimactic New Year

I've never really understood the US's--or apparently the whole world's?--obsession with the ball dropping in Times Square.  I acknowledge New York City as the center of the universe, but it still seems a little silly to me.  Even when I was an epsilon, wishing I could stay up until midnight with my parents, it was the time that mattered to me, not seeing the ball drop on TV.

Given that lack of interest, I certainly never expected to actually see the ball drop in Times Square in person.  However, one of the friends I was staying with in New York City works in an office building that overlooks Times Square, and had passes to get through the police lines so we could go to a party at his office, which included watching the ball drop from the window of a nice, heated stairwell.

I'm glad I got to see this somewhat absurd tradition in person, but I still think it seemed very anti-climactic, and I really can't understand what motivates people to stand out in the cold for hours waiting for it.


Thoughts About an Orchiectomy

I seem to be thinking about getting an orchiectomy (surgical castration) more and more these days.  The fact that I found out that one of the people I met at the Solstice vigil had one last year, and that I then ended up talking to her about it for a bit may have helped bring it to the forefront of my mind. 

I ended up talking to my therapist a bit about it last night, and I don't think I'm quite mentally ready to try to schedule surgery now, but it is definitely a thing I want to work on making myself more ready for.  Not in 2018, but maybe in 2019?

Comments

[rushthatspeaks]

I am glad it was such a good trip!

Also, Homeric Hymn to Demeter, eeeeee! /worked with this text for my thesis.

[child_of_the_air]

Thanks! It was a wonderful trip, and I was glad to get to meet you!

Also, now I have to ask what your thesis was on?

[rushthatspeaks]

I was comparing the way different names and nominal epithets for Dionysus are used across a wide swathe of ancient Greek texts, to see if I could establish when/whether some of the nominal epithets were actually names of regional deities who had wound up being identified with/syncretized into Dionysus. Like, if text X always calls Dionysus 'god of the sown field', and is from Y region, do only other texts from region Y use this epithet, and does that remain consistent over time, or does usage spread, and if so how? Or do new epithets for gods textually appear across widespread geographic areas at about the same time?

The specific thing I was looking at was contrasting the actual name 'Dionysus', which is everywhere, with 'Eubouleus', which means 'god of the sown/well-plowed field' and which is very narrow in usage, as it's much more agricultural than Dionysus epithets often get. 'Eubouleus' turns up in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, and I wanted to see if I could find any hint of it being a syncretization, because that's such an old text that the gods in it take quite different forms than they often do later. Dionysus is generally assumed to be a late-comer among the Greek gods, as worship of the others was pretty well-established before his cult arose, and I wanted to see if he'd been mapped onto an older harvest god. Proof of that happening would tell us some interesting things about the Eleusinian Mysteries, for example.

And what I found was a big, shiny pile of insufficient data. :D I got to play with some really fun directions of textual analysis, but we simply do not have enough material from the relevant time period for me to prove or disprove anything. The Hymns are so pretty on their original tablets, though, they're on gold leaf, like 1/32nd-of-an-inch-thick gold leaf, it's amazing they survived. And I basically got to tell my department that while textual analysis tools have been advancing in leaps and bounds the last couple of decades, they have not moved in directions as of yet which will enable us to get much we don't already know out of this kind of text, so it's not worth trying large-scale. My department wanted to know that-- saves a lot of people a lot of time-- so they passed the paper.

I was very glad to get to meet you, too!

[child_of_the_air]

Wow. That sounds interesting and obscure at the same time: I had no idea that Dionysus was sometimes called Eubouleus! And I certainly hadn't known that we had the Hymns surviving in the form of inscriptions on gold leaf! That is fairly amazing!