Monday, 28th February, 2005

Rinse and Repeat

(A reference, in part, to the desperate need for me to wash my hair today, but also to hitherto unestablished — or unexplained — feeling today that I ought to take stock a little, gather my thoughts, and tie up some of the loose ends that have been hanging around my head for the past six months. What follows is not one of my better posts — or indeed, not one of my more meaningful posts. It's just me trying to get some stuff out of my head.)

...

The kittens were bugging me this morning. George and Tish have taken it upon themselves to work together in the form of a "Wake Siobhan Up By Pawing Her Face" alarm clock (available from Argos, £12.99), and Biscuit just wouldn't leave me alone while I was vainly trying to convert a Quark 6 document to Quark 4 through the use of XPress Tags (and a lot of cut & paste).

Plus, the relentless stream of logs were providing just that little bit too much of a distraction (plasticbag.org-linkage is bad enough, can you imagine how bad my logwatching would be if I wrote something of interest to the /. community?), and I was in danger of spending the entire day tweaking Vim's colouring.

So, I decided to come over to Kath's house

(Forgetting, of course, that that wouldn't solve the kitten-crisis ... I'm having to kick Murphy off my laptop every five seconds)

The Pro and the Con of Kath's House

Pro: Kath has a washing machine that actually works — unlike mine which has been sitting in my yard since September, waiting for me to install it into what used to be my outside toilet, and is now probably busted.

Con: There is no internet here I am offline

Thinking about it though, that might actually be a 'Pro' — I've been noticing recently that I have a complete inability to actually get on with stuff when I'm online — there's just far too many distractions

...

Anyway, let me try and tie those loose ends up...

Me

Rather than create a seperate "About me page" and get all involved in the "where do I put the link?" debate, I'll just write it here I think...

I always approach the task of writing about myself with quite a bit of trepidation (is that a word?). In some respects, it's a completely narcissistic excercise, and in others it's almost nigh-on impossible to try and work out what people might be interested to know about yourself (if indeed, anything at all ). I find it really hard to write about my boy self — when I'm doing worky-stuff (writing about me in a serious and professional way doesn't come easily to me), and even though I can ramble the whole night long when my head is in Siobhan-World, that only really includes rambling about the way I feel about things — not things actually about me.

I also worry sometimes all the time, that the majority of what I write is of interest to absolutely no-one — but then again, I should be writing for myself. Perhaps.

...

My name is not Siobhan Curran. Obviously. I just chose it one night when I was put under pressure to come up with an Irish-sounding name very quickly. I did used to know a Siobhan Curran, and I hope to God that she's never ever tried Googling herself.

I'm also (stating the obvious again here) not a woman. I mean, it's all very well to declare that the boundary between male and female is a grey blur, but if I'm put on the spot, then yep, I'm a man.

(Called Graham.)

But, no-one ever wants to here about that — and in a lot of ways, neither do I. One of the continuing thoughts that's been running through my head this past year or so is that it doesn't really matter whether I'm a boy or a girl — what's important is the context within which I write. I liken it (when pressed on it) to method acting. I don't know much about it, but in some ways, when I write, I have a very specific character in my head — who I call Siobhan — and the way I write is determined by an image of 'self' that I've created over the past 3 years of blogging.

Make any sense?

Work

So, we all know (I hope) that I'm an Art Lecturer at a UK university, and that I work there part-time. But asides from that, I do several things: I do some freelance graphic design work, and every now and again I work as a repro technician at a printers; I pick up the odd bit of web-design work that helps pay the bills (note of sarcasm: 'doesn't help enough'); but as well as those, I'm also an artist.

"Yeah yeah yeah Siobhan — course your an artist"

No really I've even had the odd exhibition

I tend to do two things — photography and film, and (despite my assertions to the contrary) mostly stripey photography and film.

Like I said, I don't always do stripes — my series of 60 photographs, each a one-second exposure as I cross each street from 60th to 1st on Second Avenue in Manhattan, is a prime example of that — but I find it the most natural way of achieving what I want from my photographs. The goal in them is to create something that has a very specific aesthetic, from something which is very very private indeed.

It's about a need to produce images, and a need to share the 10,000 or so pictures currently sitting on my hard drive — but in a way I'm comfortable with.

I get a lot of joy out of making them, and indeed a lot of joy from looking at them (especially the one I got aluminium-mounted. OMG it was gorgeous) — although I think I'd get even more joy from them if I actually managed to sell one. Much as I'd love to link to my boy-site from here, I won't — probably ever really. I guess I'm just not quite ready for that...

Pseudonyms

...which reminds me of something. Nothing major, just a little thought I had on my drive over here. It strikes me as quite interesting that I'm known more as Siobhan than I am Graham. I reckon that if I was to tot up all the people that I've met as Siobhan and who have visited either of my girl-sites, then it would be a lot more than everyone I've ever met as Graham.

Which makes me wonder whether or not I should pursue my work as Siobhan?

Despite what it must seem like in regards to the amount of stuff that I write about myself, I'm not really that much of an extroverted person. Writing like this — within the framework of a pseudo-anonymous medium — gives me the chance to be a little less precious about myself — a little less self-critical and self-conscious. I can hide, I guess, behind a personality that I've basically invented. Safe in the knowledge that I don't usually have to face up to the paralysing, instrospective angst of worrying about everything that I say.

tranniefesto.co.uk

I also wanted to explain a little bit about this site (or, if you're on my other site, then not this one). It's been in its current form since the start of January, and it's really changed the way I exist online.

Context

See, before Christmas, it was bothering me slightly that the only kind of self-contextualisation I could achieve, was in my own community. True, it's a wonderful community but nevertheless, there's something of the goldfishbowl about it.

And it's not like the whole focus of my online life is restricted soley to ranting about wearing wedding dresses — I do do other stuff you know

So the whole point of setting up a blog-only site was to try and expand into a wider audience — get some new perspectives on things. And all-in-all, it's been rather fun Living up here in the North West of England, it's all too easy to find yourself living in a bubble — detached from what's going on in the rest of the world (this is especially the case in Lancaster — or at least, that's how it seems to me. I imagine NRT and Looby perhaps see it differently )

One of the surprising outcomes of doing this though, which I think was a direct result of getting nomminated for a Bloggie, was the sense of 'authenticity' that came with it. Being on the outskirts of current debates is something that bugs me greatly, and there was a shift, I think, in the way I've been writing. Obviously, I seem to have been writing a lot more since the start of the year, which is perhaps a result of either (a) a new audience, or (b) having a great big sidebar that acts as a kind of marker to where I feel I should be writing to, but also, I dunno, it feels like doing all this has opened up the 'legitimacy' of writing about stuff. Before, I guess that I always felt a little guilty whenever I strayed from the "What I am Wearing Today" kind of posts, but now I figure that at least one person a day might be vaguely interested in reading this shit.

(maybe )

Structure

I think I would be right in saying that this isn't a weblog, in the strict sense of the word anyway. Truth is, it wasn't ever meant to be one. I started writing diary pages when I first put siobhansplace.co.uk online, but it wasn't until months later that I coded anything that could remotely be called a "blog".

Since then, it's evolved from a series of HTML pages, into this rather disorganised soup of PHP, XML feeds and over-excessive MySQL queries — to the point at which to do anything to the structure means a radical rethink each time.

If I was a professional coder, I'd have been sacked by now

The main bulk of the site is a MySQL database — but some of the other things, like the del.icio.us links and the Flickr photographs are handled by parsing RSS feeds.

The comments aren't stored seperately — they're just embedded straight into database, which is why this whole thing ends up as a bit of a conversation, rather than a traditional blog. In fact, there are three seperate functions in the diary.php script that process comments — one for each time I've done a revision of them. The first lot were stuck — formatting and all — into the database, but that made it impossible to style them differently for both sites. The second attempt involved trying to adjust the styling so that it was flexible enough to we reworked — but failed. The third (and current) version stuck them in as delimited paragraphs, which I then parse seperately for each site.

The next version, incidently, is going to give each one a unique ID so that I can get around that [refresh]-double-comment problem

I get the impression, that if I was to start again from scratch, then I could make the whole thing much more efficient and organised — but I don't work like that I much prefer to web-whittle (that is such a glorious word Miss K thank you!) and tweak things as I'm going along.

Developments

The thing I really want to do next is to write a script that parses my del.icio.us and Flickr feeds every half-an-hour, compares them with a cached copy, and automagically inserts any new stuff directly into the main body of the blog, so I can update things like pictures and links without having to be online.

(I don't mean "without having to be online" BTW — I mean that I can use my camera-phone to shove pictures here when I'm away from home. Ignore the del.icio.us reference — how the hell could I put links here if I wasn't online? )

The other thing I've been wondering about doing for a long time now is writing either a better CMS system for all of this (I'll explain what I've got at the moment in a minute), or potentially throwing myself headfirst and writing a native OSX application to do it (probably a bit of a pipe-dream there )

The way I have things set up, is that I tend to use a text-editor (usually BBEdit) to write the main bulk of an entry — with clunky HTML markup as I go along. Then I use an old page that I wrote ages ago that has a <textarea> on it and a submit button.

And that's it.

If I cock anything up (which happens quite often believe it or not), I have to jump into Cocoa MySQL to quickly work out why the formatting is all screwed.

I used to use a sort of 'editing' PHP page, but I found that that screwed up certain characters (like whenever I used &lt; ) and it also, for some reason, messed up comments too.

Once I've got a day in place, I then have a special Apache-protected space on the site that I use to append stuff to the end. Kinda like my own little 'add comment' form, if you like

Look, it works for me OK?

Like I said, the whole thing is enormously clunky — until I wrote the 'append' thing, for example, I used to have a reccuring problem of accidently posting two entries on one day — I hadn't written a "check there's not already something for today" function. I could ramble about this for weeks, but I doubt anyone is really interested. Let's just say that, given the time, I could make the whole thing a lot better, easier, and foolproof. But the chances of me ever getting the time are remote.

Why I think I'm a Transvestite

tranny self

I mentioned I had a theory on this a while back, didn't I?

Well, firstly you have to understand that I have a stupid phobia. I have no idea where it came from, or why I have it, but (as I've mentioned once before) I'm scared shitless of buttons.

Nasty nasty horrible little things that have no right of being on this earth — especially now we have zips. OK?

I really really do hate them — and I hate clothes that have them, ie. shirts.

Now, when I was very very little, I used to daydream about girls. I used to fantasise that the girls I had crushes on got put into terrible situations (OMG, this is such a classic 'damsel in distress' kind of thing) and I would come and rescue them. And then hero-me would get the girl

(Look, bear with me on this one will you? In some respects, I'm not sure I should even be talking about this — it is, perhaps, just that little bit too personal, even for me )

And one of the dire situations that I used to imagine, was that they had to wear shirts. Nasty nasty (again) things which were an awfully terrible thing to have to wear.

Obviously, being six years old, (a) it never occured to me that I was having sexual fantasies, and (b) it was very unlikely that I'd ever manage to get myself into such a situation in real life, so I did the next best thing:

I dressed myself up instead.

I have no idea why I did that. None at all. I also can't exactly remember what was going through my head when I did it, all I can remember is that it seemed the most logical thing to do, and it felt funny ('funny' as in "tingly in my pants funny") to do so.

...

Basically, what you've got going on here is a description of how Siobhan managed to end up with a fetish by messing around with clothes when she was young.

Does all this explain why I'm a transvestite? Is what I do these days directly linkable back to innocent role-play as a child?

Nah, course not But I think that that's how I discovered transvestism — or more accurately, discovered I was a transvestite. I mean, it's evolved dramatically over the years — from furtive dressing-sessions when no-one was in the house, through parading around Lancaster University in a hideous ball-gown and bad wig convincing myself (erroneously) that I looked like a woman, through a period about 6 years ago of longing to go out and meet other people, through an (expensive!) epiphical moment in a basement on the Euston Road in Londond, through holidays in the States, through new friends and new experiences (), through a whole host of image/hair/make-up/clothing changes, to the point I'm at today. And I'm sure it'll change more over the years.

But that was the start, I think. Dressing up as a girl to fuel six-year-old fantasies because there wasn't a real girl around.

The Picture Quest

Which kinda brings me (in a round about way) to something I've been trying to do for years — take the perfect picture.

And not just the perfect picture in terms of looking convincing as a woman, taking a picture of me, looking like a woman, dressed as a man.

Don't ask me why — I think it has something to do with what I've been writing about above — but every time I do a set of photographs (or, almost every time at least) I try taking some with me wearing a suit and tie.

The lack of any actual pictures of me online should give some kind of clue as to how successful I've been at this.

What I've found, you see, over the years, is that whenever I dress up, there are certain clues (if you like) to me being a man. I obsess, for example, about the size of my nose, and even though everyone rightly points out that there are loads of women with noses bigger than mine, I feel that it acts as a bit of a giveaway.

And the same goes, perhaps, for the clothes themselves. If I stick myself in a swathing mass of crinoline, then then viewer's instinctive reaction is that they're looking at a photograph of a woman (a woman with terrible dress-sense, perhaps ), and the onus is then on them to figure out that I'm not. Whereas if I'm wearing men's clothes, then they start from the viewpoint that I'm a guy.

Does that make any sense whatsoever?

It strikes me that our brains make immediate judgements about images — we assume things are a certain way until we study them more closely and the clues all add up to an understanding of what we're looking at.

So if I start the whole process in men's clothes, the mind has to do a further leap — one that's pretty hard to do.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'll know when I've managed to reach a point where I can look convincing, when I'm able to take a photograph that challenges gender on as many levels as possible It's a personal goal — one that perhaps I don't share with many of my community — and one that I probably won't share until I actually get there.

So...

I can't promise that I won't bore everyone senseless by not coming back to these at some point in the future, and I apologise if I seem to being going over old ground again and again recently — but I'm trying to verbalise what's in my head right now. I didn't start this diary to talk about things — I started it to record things that happened when I was out dressed — but it's kinda evolved into something different.

Having said that though, it's very likely that the next thing I write will be my promised (to Kath) account of what happened last weekend in Belfast, complete with the utter horror of what can only be descibed as a web-based enforced slide-show of at least fifty photographs, none of which will be remotely interesting to anyone apart from me and Kath

But then again, as I keep saying (mainly to myself...) it's my diary — I can write utter self-absorbed shite in it if I want to

Rambly crap seems to be the order of the day

(It seemed to me that the first 'dressed' picture you posted was the one where the lights failed and was almost totally black — compare and contrast with now)

I think that might be the first picture I stuck in the diary (although, I think there's one of me sat infront of my Mac with a glass of wine posted earlier). But it's obviously not the first picture of me I stuck on a website. That accolade goes to the shot I took the day after I got back from London after my ahem Transformation 'experience'.

Wanna see?

...

Actually Alli, thankyou for that I worry sometimes that I put too much faith in this blog for giving me a feeling of self-worth. I've been obsessing a little too much recently about what's going on in it — and it makes me smile inside to think that someone does actually enjoy reading the stuff that I write.

Makes me feel a little bit more connected to the world

YES!

Evil, nasty, ghastly little pieces of Satan's shit masquerading as some kind of fabric-securing-device. They're horrible!

In all seriousness though, I've had this discussion before, but I do really hate them, and I'm scared of them too.

Seriously.

There was once one on the floor of a flat I used to live in. I couldn't bear to look at it never mind touch it to pick it up. EVen the thought of it rattling up the inside of a vacuum clearner nozzle made me shudder.

I know, I know, it's irrational — but that doesn't make it any less real for me. I also know that there's a slight anomaly in that in some of my more recent photos I'm wearing a black blouse — but I can almost cope with them if they're black on black. I guess I can't see them too well so I can ignore them. I do it up (and notice that I only usually do up two of them ) as quickly as I can so I don't have to touch them too long.

Incidently, the extent of this ridiculous phobia can be demonstrated in that new picture — the one where I look like Edward Scissorhands (I do know that BTW — like I said, I'm just trying to experiment with different looks). I could see one of the buttons (ew I hate even typing the word) in the photograph, so I Photoshopped it out.

Thanks dave

I see Susan, so let me get this straight. According to the new ten commandments I should go around doing everyone's make-up for them, stuffing them into ludicrously huge dresses and taking pictures of them?

Sounds quite good really

LOL

And listen, I'm not being Little Miss Aloofy-wotsit and ignoring what everyone's said — I just want to come back to it at a later date, when I'm not so pooped