Intersex Girl in a Binary World

Man, is it hard to come up with blog entries. I never did the whole diary thing as a kid.  I'm thinking of maybe just posting pictures I've taken on my phone.  Which would just be a bunch of skylines, interspersed with random pictures of empty bottles.  Sometimes I think I'm Andy Warhol.

So I go in for surgery in two days.  It's a procedure I honestly should have had done long ago.  If all goes well, they're going to repair the hole in my gut.  A part of me is very afraid, but I don't even have the right to whine.  I developed this condition as a result of a past suicide attempt.  I never imagined I'd be damaging my body for life. I guess the fear is natural, but the main thing on my mind right now is how little we do to actually address the problem of suicide.  Suicide claims more lives than war, murder, and natural disasters combined.  We should be treating it like the epidemic it is, but it gets swept under the rug because it's just too embarrassing to admit that we've all been there.

I've recently begun reading THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND by Julian Jaynes.  I'm only 44 pages in, and it's already the most thrilling book I've ever picked up.  I've long been absorbed with the hard problem of consciousness, and this is the first of its kind that addresses (and is going to attempt to solve it) in a totally accessible way.  Among the many observations he's made so far: - We are not conscious all the time.  Consider a piano piece you learned long ago and are playing for a recital.  You are not actively conscious of which keys your fingers are falling on.  If you injected consciousness into that experience, you'd probably mess it up! - Consciousness plays no part, or rather, no direct part, in our human ability to reason.  Consider all the times you've meditated on a seemingly unanswerable problem, only to put it aside and,  once you weren't thinking  about it, come up with the solution. I jus

So much energy from all the candidates in the recent Dem debates.  Everyone's piggybacking on Sanders' ideas, and I have to admit he's not as palatable now that he's sitting in an echo chamber.  I don't necessarily think that's disingenuous.  Politicians represent, or are supposed to represent, the views of their constituents.  I mean, there's a reason all Democratic lawmakers are pro-marriage equality when just twelve years ago, most of them were against it. I'd really like to see a Harris-Warren ticket, but Castro and Yang have some amazing ideas.  Whoever wins the nomination, I hope they pick the best of each candidates' proposals and we wind up seeing something dynamic and incredible. Times have been trying, that's for sure.  But I also feel like it's an exciting time to be a voter.