aphenine

Life is a bit crazy at the moment. I went to my therapist's and told him about how I had lain awake at night with many thoughts racing through my head as it felt like everything was clamouring for attention. The net result is that my sleeping pattern is destroyed and I feel exhausted since I have no idea when I should be sleeping or waking. It's a nightmare.

I started off the session saying there were about four or five main things on my mind and I tried listing them all. By the time I got onto number ten, it was more than plain that I need to slow down quite a bit.

One of the things that I did was to sign on at the job centre. I've signed a pledge that I will look for work twice a week and visit the jobcentre at least once a week to use their search for jobs. Unfortunately, I'm not really sure what I can and can't do at the moment, and I haven't found anything that I feel comfortable doing. I'm sure I did see one job that I could have done at some point in the last six months float past my inbox, and I'd like to see one like that float past again. It's a lot to think about and I thought I was ready, but now I'm feeling more than a little overwhelmed.

I also took a trip to the local charity shop looking for clothes. The prices were pretty amazing, and I tried on a lot of things that might fit me. I didn't walk out with anything because I couldn't quite figure out what does look good on me. It still hasn't quite sunk into my brain yet that I can now go to any store and buy all the female clothing I want (and can afford). Better yet, though, would be buying all the female clothing I need, and I really need some more skirts and trousers. Fortunately, I did manage to order two extra pairs of all-purpose tights over the internet. Expensive, yes, but so worth it. Getting clothing is quite heavily on my mind, and I would desperately like to have just enough so that I could focus on other things without having to worry about the fact that I need to do washing more than once a week.

Also heavily on my mind are hormonal changes. Just the GIC's promise to send hormones seems to have kicked off a further change in my hormonal balance. I've shifted even further towards being female and the effects are proving... interesting. It's really hammered my male sex drive, and it's started to push my female one further than I've ever experienced it, which is making my life suddenly very complicated and very different from what it was before. However, it feels amazing and I wouldn't want to change it for the world.

Before Christmas I ran into numerous small issues with the Sea Cadet website that left me feeling like I was drowning in small bugs. So shortly after the New Year, I went at them and managed to fix all of them in a short space of time.

The hosting company had disabled mod_security on Apache, which fixed all the drag and drop problems, over the Christmas period. So I managed to work with the display modes and get them to do what I wanted. This meant I could write the first enhanced page with inline images, and using the inline images module, I wrote an advert for renting the Sea Cadet premises. It seems to have worked pretty well.

I also looked for CSS debugging tools. I figured they must exist, and found one almost immediately for Firefox called Firebug. This instantly displays all the elements on-screen and maps them to the HTML source code. It's relatively easy to select something and see what CSS classes apply to it, and it's possible to see what the level of overriding is. As a tool, it's pretty awesome, and I managed to fix the drop down menus so they match the site scheme pretty quickly, as well as learn a lot more about how CSS works and what basic mistakes I was doing. For example, I worked out that I failed to get the links on the secondary menu to change colour because the secondary menu was an unordered list tag with an ID in it, not a unordered list tag in a division which has the ID, as happens in the main navigation. So I had to write ul#secondary-menu not #secondary-menu ul.

In a second session, I then braved the evils of the Views module to see if I could display all news in a list on a page called News. It turned out to be very simple, but the Views module has way too many options, and I was scared if I ticked the wrong one, Bad Things would have happened.

I don't really like New Year's resolutions, as in the past I always found that my obsessive personality wanted to keep anything I make as a resolution, no matter how obsolete or impossible it became. Failure made me feel bad, it put pressure on me and the whole system tended not to adapt very well to new events. Not to mention, I always seemed to make resolutions of all the hard things that I didn't want to do but I felt needed doing, which always seemed to be male-related activities.

However, this year, there are some things I want to achieve in the New Year anyway, and they're as close to New Year's resolutions as I'm ever going to come.

* The first one is that, next year, I want to celebrate New Year's with people, as opposed to doing it on my own. It'd be a nice change to organise something, and if I have more energy over the Christmas period next time, I most definitely will.
* The second one is that I really want to get a job and earn some money. I've set myself April as a target, and so far I'm moving nicely towards that goal. I need to get my driving license changed to match my new name, and then I can start applying for jobs. If I complete the Islington Sea Cadets website, I'll also have my first entry in a portfolio for web design.
* The third one is that, if possible, I'd like to start hormones this year. That will depend on many other factors, though, particularly on my second resolution.
* The fourth one is that I'd like to meet up and keep in contact with lots of people I haven't seen for a while, make new friends and end any friendships that aren't viable. Last year saw a lot of travelling as I met up with people, mainly those from my shared house in my undergraduate days and darwinian_woman, and although it could be traumatic, it was also good, and I don't do it enough. I also talked a lot on the phone with a wonderful transperson from my Birmingham days and met lots of transpeople at TransLondon, some of whom I've seen a little of outside, and who may or may not become friends. And although I went to visit kht, it doesn't look like we'll get on, which is fine.

Meh, I'm not too happy with the last post, and this is for a variety of reasons. When I started it, I wanted it to explain some background to some thinking which helped me work certain things out and has been responsible for me feeling calmer then I have for a long time, and more certain about what I want from the transition process.

The problem is that the thinking I've done directly contradicts a lot of the "accepted" thinking that I was exposed to among certain groups of people in Oxford. The problem is that many of these people are still on my Livejournal, and I've been putting off dealing with it for reasons that, until recently I haven't quite understood. I can just imagine them reading something like the last post and just shaking their heads, and that already makes me angry and defensive before I've begun, which is not good.

I'd meant to leave this to until after the New Year, as mass recrimination is not in the Christmas spirit, but because things are interrelated, I've already broached it and I don't really get much choice.

The main thing is that I've been talking to my therapist about this in the counselling sessions, trying to explain things to him in a way that make sense, and verbalise the kinds of feelings that lead to me feeling so angry and defensive, as well as taking in events such as the time I lost it against vampire_kitten and booted her off my LJ after threatening her, the time I booted kht and the whole mess I had with the all female group on another website.

I've been wondering if the fact that this kind of stuff keeps happening is due to something being wrong with me, and I've been interested to see how he'd react. The problem is that, well, he's been really supportive and affirmative every time I've bought stuff like this up. In fact, he's been more supportive than I've been of myself. About the vampire_kitten incident, I believe his comment was "I knew you had it in you", the it he was referring to being homicidal rage. About the kind of feminism I was exposed to back then, the word he used was "brainwashing". I wouldn't have gone quite that far, but it's a common theme in our sessions that I'm held back often by fear when my experience contradicts the perceived wisdom of the time, and I still live in fear of the Bad Stuff that I'm certain will happen when I do.

Not just that, but just the fact that, explaining it to him, my actions are not only plausible, they make a consistent sense and feel right. I'm not angry and defensive because there's something wrong with me. I have reasons. The problem has been more working them out and showing them to myself and getting the confidence to go with them, and then communicating them to other people.

One of the things that's become really clear to me is that the views of a group of people I knew in Oxford surrounding the Gilbert & Sullivan Society, as well as a large chunk of the general 1990s feminist theory I absorbed make no sense when taken with my experiences. I find there's no way I can pull together all of those things, and something has to give. I've changed and grown, and unless the people I knew then have changed and grown in the same way, we have little in common any more.

I was wondering what to do about this, and then I had the spat with kht, where both she and a few other people exhibited a complete lack of understanding of what I'm going through, and which is less than the minimum needed to maintain a viable friendship. I chucked her off my LJ as a temporary measure, or as a sacrifice to my anger and wrath, I wasn't quite sure at the time what. The problem is that, I keep expecting to feel guilty, or some measure of regret at what was clearly a moment of passion. The problem is that I don't. In fact, I've thought about it only a few times in the intervening period, and even then not very seriously. If I had to characterise how I felt about having acrimoniously argued with someone I cared about a great deal during a fluid and formative period of my life and who has tried to be supportive since I came out, I'd have to say that I felt very little. It was the biggest non-event ever, and I feel more guilt and regret about the fact that I feel so little guilt and regret. And since I do not lack the ability to feel guilt or regret, something is very clearly wrong.

The conclusion that my therapist and I have reached is that it's past time I moved on. Although I deserve a share of the blame for some of the conflict I've caused, equally lots of it are not my fault and certain readjustments to reflect that are long overdue. So in the New Year, I'm going to clear my LJ friendslist of anyone connected to the G&S society. It's not a final thing, and if anyone wants to still know me, or talk to me, then we should make some effort to reinvigorate the relationship, like actually meeting in real life.

Today I went up to Sheffield to see my other cousin, husband and their child. While there, I gave away my old wooden train set to the one and a half year old to trash play with. I feel a little nostalgic at it's loss, but it's good its bringing joy to someone. It also survived me, so I have some hopes that it will survive him.

The trip was long, and made longer by the fact we had to make a side trip to pick up my cousin (her sister) near Ely. The fact that Sheffield and Ely are both north of London is pretty much where any geographical similarity ends. My cousin is living in a house with her (long term/serious?) boyfriend while she recuperates from a busted knee, so by picking her up I got to meet him too, which made it a bumper day for significant others.

I made the trip en femme, under the traditionally shortened Polish form of my name. Everyone made an effort to call me by it, which was good. I was quite terrified by it, but it was also same old same old, in that I've come out to many people in the last few months. I never knew stark raving terror could acquire a level of familiarity.

My other cousin had decided to embrace the whole transition and bought me clothes to try on. The bad thing is that my taste and her taste just... don't match. In fact, both my cousins don't really dress like I'd like to dress. The good thing is, of course, I figured this out, and I have two pairs of leggings and one top that is not hopeless. My style seems to be more conservative dress, with long skirts and chunky jumpers.

I tried playing with the little kid and looking after him a bit. I don't think I'm made to look after kids, part of which seems to be down to the whole childhood not playing with girl's toys. It's a bit late to start training on the live ones.

This Christmas I got quite a few games from my parents. What's pretty awesome is that they're a really good mix and all ones I want to play.

My father noticed I had Anno 1404 and, having read some reviews, decided that buying the other Anno games would be a waste of time, but did buy me Anno 2070, which is quite radically different in content, if not gameplay so far.

He also got me Supreme Commander 2. I wasn't going to buy this game myself, as they removed most of the really fun elements from the original, but it's nice to have and I can at least enjoy the plot of the campaign missions, which carry on the story of the original.

My mother, on the other hand, got me Just Dance 2 with extra songs and Just Dance 3. There are many awesome songs on there that I would actually like to dance to, and the one I'm most looking forwards to is Satellite by the two year's ago Eurovision winner from Germany. Mambo No 5, Scissor Sister's "I don't feel like dancing" (which, as herringprincess once pointed out, really is a song that makes you want to get on up and dance) and Donna Summer's "I feel love" are all some of the awesome songs I'm so looking forwards to.

Not only that, but she got me Zumba 2. This we have played and, well, *pants*. My mother got me to try it first and told me to do the short class. Halfway through as I'm on the third song, panting and desperately praying it will end so I can collapse, she notes that short Zumba workouts are usually half an hour. Gee, thanks for telling me that then. I threatened suitable forms of slow and painful death as I launched into the fourth song, but settled for watching my mum trying the short program, since it amounted to pretty much the same thing.

I also have a full Harry potter box set, which is awesome, and we all wanted to watch it over Christmas. Of course, that meant I hired Seven part 1 from LoveFilm and my parents couldn't tell me not to.

Granddad also gave me £100, which is pretty useful. If I spend it carefully, I can achieve a lot with it, but I really have to think carefully.

I got my parents a coffee grinder, which my mum had asked me to get after talking to me about how she was going to buy a new one as the old was breaking, shortly after we had a conversation about how hard it is to have any ideas about Christmas gifts when I only have Argos vouchers. We then put one and one together to get two, for we are clever. *nods*

Unfortunately, my other present, an espresso machine, didn't go down so well. They liked the idea, liked the machine and everything just, my mother doesn't wish to sacrifice any more space in the kitchen to gadgets. So I have to take it back :(

The Sea Cadet website has ground to a halt at the moment, mainly over small niggly details which are draining and can all be fixed.

The main problem seems to be with CSS and menus. I started adding content to the website, only to find out that Drupal's menu system, in its default form, doesn't do menu levels of more than one, even though the menu system has child-parent relationships so that you can group less used menu items under parent items.

Reading up about it made me realise that I should have bypassed the main menu and added a menu as a block which I could then add to the side. So I did that, only to find out that having both the main menu and the block menu broke the block menu so that it didn't properly expand parent menu items. Yey...

Reading a little more, I installed the Nice Menus package, which fixed everything by providing drop down menus. I was very happy with it, but I couldn't get it to work in any other form except as a block. So I read up some more and figured out how to change my website template on my own (as all the websites I saw kept telling me not to touch the template). This works beautifully and I posted how I did it on the Drupal website, so other people can find it.

The only problem is that, having added the Nice Menus system, it uses completely different CSS sheets than the original menu did. As a result, the menu looks out of place. So I tried changing it, only it refused to work and I don't know why. That's as far as I got with that at the moment.

In the meantime, there's a separate issue in which the drag and drop functionality fails to work because of mod_security's rules, which clobbers the service of jquery.cookie.js as the main javascript cookie system.

I contacted my host provider with a lovely email detailing the problem, links to the solution and bug reports and good reasons why they should fix it. The response? Please email us from the billing address, as we can't help you otherwise. Aaaaargh!

Then there's been a further issue with embedding images. After doing lots of reading, I discovered that there's a module that allows easy embedding of images into Node content. This lovely thing requires a WYSIWYG editor, though, which required the WYSIWYG package, and installing an editor (I went with tinyMCE).

Eventually, after all these steps I got it to work wonderfully, and I can embed images into the main text. So I started to work on writing some news stories and a page advertising the premises when I realised that I couldn't hide the pictures from displaying outside the text without drag and drop support. Double Aaaaargh!

All in all, this project is increasingly feeling more like a Sisyphean task. Drupal makes a lot of things that are hard very easy, but I'm discovering that a lot of things that should be easy are very, very hard, and there's the whole feeling of two steps forwards, one step back, as I discover I didn't do something in the right way, and have to go and undo it and then carry on forwards.

Life has been a little busy for the last couple of days, but in a good way.

I figured out that the best way to clear my way to the job centre was to notify the National Insurance Office of my name change first, so a letter has gone off to them, which will arrive whenever it does, given that it's Christmas. The next step is to tell my bank, which will be the chore for next week, and then I need to get a new photograph and notify the DVLA. I think it's also a criminal act under the Road Traffic Act 1988 if I do not do so without delay, which is fun. But as my passport is expired, the driving license would be the best way to get a photographic ID in my female persona, which should make everything easier. With all of that, I can walk in a prove who I am without having to do lots of unnecessary explaining and I can save talking about being trans to relevant people.

On Friday, I decided to accompany my dad and S, who is the CO of the Sea Cadet Unit that my father is involved with, in helping them set up for the Christmas disco. I'm not really sure why I did at the time, but S has been coming around for a while, knows I'm trans and is really comfortable about it. I feel quite happy being around him, so I helped out. I enjoyed the whole thing immensely since I spent time down at the unit cleaning up the kitchen area so that it would be fit for human habitation, let alone cooking. During the time, dad and S made random teasing sexist comments and I felt comfortable giving back as good as I got, that's how comfortable I felt, bossing them around in my quest to make everything clean and letting them do the heavy carrying. S showed me how to make tomato roses, since he used to be a cook, which was also fun. Dad dropped me back home later and I basked in the warmth of home before eating something and sleeping perhaps the best I have in a long time.

Yesterday, I also managed to meet up with nyamburu for the first time since I'd been to see all my house-mates from my old undergraduate days. We sat in a nice cafe/tea-room around Hampstead Heath station and talked for a while. Having drunk lots of tea, caught up on each other's lives and talked random stuff, we felt like a walk, but were caught out from our plan to walk back through the Heath as it was dark. It gets so dark so quickly now. So instead we walked the route that I use to get to my therapist, walking along the edge of the Heath to the walk that heads into Hampstead. Hampstead is lovely in the dark. We then walked through Frognal and down onto the Finchley Road, where the next station on the Overground is.

Today is putting up the Christmas tree day. In taking down the decorations, my dad found the paper chains I'd made for last year. I'm not sure if I want to go to all that effort this year, but I'll see. Last year's Christmas was a bit of a disaster that I rescued in questionable style, but this year mum has everything much more in hand.

I've been reading chapter 12 of the Constitution of Liberty, which talks about Constitutionalism. I've already mentioned that the purpose of Constitutionalism, under Liberalism, is to promote the idea that the government is not allowed to pass any law it likes, including those which restrict liberty. Especially, it aims to ensure that rulers do not take short cuts to use means that, in the cold light of day, they would otherwise not wished used, especially against themselves later on.

Although the initial ideas behind the restriction of liberty were aimed against abuses of power by the Crown, such power was later claimed by Parliament. The citizens of the former British Colonies wished to preserve the power of the English Bill of Rights in 1689 against dictators but for it to also apply to the democratic institutions they were building.

The chapter relates some of the story of the struggle to frame a constitution that worked, much of which caused me to go and look certain things up on Wikipedia, because the process, as I was not aware of, has not been very smooth. Hayek argued that, although the Constitution was a thing created by the People regarding the governing of themselves, much of it grew out of historical accident. Indeed, the US Constitution, far from being a great blueprint for liberty, had some glaring holes in it, and with historical hindsight, some of them are very, very obvious.

The most glaring is the fact that, despite specifying a democratic government, they didn't seem to bother to specify who could vote, or who could be a citizen until the 14th Amendment. This made it easy to circumvent the Constitution by creating groups who were not citizens and therefore had no rights. For example, slaves.

Another glaring omission is that the United States Constitution, which contains a Bill of Rights, did not apply to the States themselves. In other words, all of the high aspiration of the United States Bill of Rights extended to only the Federal government's dealing with the citizenry, not to the State's actions with the citizenry, and the State was perfectly allowed to do nasty things to it's citizens. This was again changed in the Fourteenth Amendment by a tenuous link through the idea of Due Process, which was interpreted by the Supreme Court to mean that the Bill of Rights applied to the States, as well as the Federal Government, which is pretty scary when you think about it. It also explains the mania Americans have with Due Process.

The Framers of the Constitution were worried about including a Bill of Rights into the Constitution because it would be implied that these, and only these rights, were of any meaning, or worthy of protection. This is strange, because the Ninth Amendment specifically states that this is not true. This prevents interpreting the Bill of Rights as an absolute document. However, this, and the section of the Fourteenth Amendment that comes right before the Due Process clause, both support the idea that other rights may or may not exist in addition to the Bill of Rights.

None of this has, however, stopped the Supreme Court from interpreting the Constitution as the be all and end all of United States law, a position that caused them to start amassing legislative power, something they were never supposed to have. This caused them to come into conflict with Congress under Roosevelt in 1937, under the Court Packing Bill. They kept ruling New Deal reforms as unconstitutional, leading to Roosevelt to try the questionable tactic of expanding the size of the Supreme Court, in order to put his cronies on there.

The Ninth Amendment is particularly interesting because it helps me understand some of the Republican attitudes towards liberty in the United States, as they are making many of the same arguments as were made then to try to argue that any form of socialism or environmentalism is unconstitutional. Additionally, Democrats have made the same noises about expanding the Supreme Court in order to get rid of Republican opposition to their ideas. Indeed, it seems to me that the Supreme Court is very politicised at this time, and more of an instrument of legislative power than ever, and these arguments have found resonance once again.

I've been working a little more on the Sea Cadets website. It's been coming along slowly and I've been slowly tweaking the design to be nicer now I put some content into it and can see how the content looks like when its rendered.

One of the things that should have been simple, but has turned out to be extremely difficult has been getting a photo gallery to work. Like all things that happen this way, it's difficult because of a small series of decisions that seemed like a good idea at the time but turned out to be really bad decisions in hindsight. The first decision was that I used Drupal 7, not 6. This is because the the automated installer in CPanel, Fantastico, recommended that as the default version, so I thought, why not? It can't be cutting edge stuff, and there's already a Drupal 8 being developed.

However, there was a huge change from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7, and a lot of the really useful modules that 6 has don't work in 7, and Photo Album happens to be one of them. Bugger. So after much looking on the internet, I found out that there was a way around this involving some experimental code and one of the new "features" of Drupal 7.

One of the main changes in 7 seems to have been the importation of the Content Creation Kit module, or CCK for short, into the Drupal Core. Drupal uses a node system to display all content, and the CCK was neat in the sense that you could add extra stuff to a node. This is now handled by the Fields module, which adds "fields" to nodes.

Because of this change, the old Photo Album way of doing things (having an image attached to a node) is deprecated in favour of Image Fields. These allow images to be attached directly to nodes. So the new way is that you create an image field and add the images of your album to that field. But the problem is that there's no multi file uploader, and that's the experimental bit of code. The MUpload module doesn't allow image checking, however, so I managed upload 3Mb images with a 2Mb limit into my photo album. Then there's the problem that I can add new pictures at the start, but once I have pictures, I can only remove them.

I'm not really sure what to do. At some point I think I'll need to write some code and contribute to Drupal development somehow, but I'm not sure how at the moment. In the meantime, I've had my first experiences coding a module and learning about the Drupal module system. It makes sense to learn how to code Drupal modules in general if I want to learn how to be a web developer, but looking through the mass of Drupal modules in development, there are many ways to achieve what I want, and I'm not sure which one to pick.