I’ve done a lot of shopping lately, and it’s not for music gear! Christmas gifts of course. The new phones, and necessary accessories, and a couple of apps. Clothes and jewelry and stuff because I want to step up my nonbinary presentation a bit (and this part is where I’m not quite finished with the shopping…)
One more minor complaint about the Pixel 8a: it is very slippery. The back of mine (in white) almost looks like a squishy silicone rubber, but there’s Gorilla Glass. It might as well be coated in olive oil. I don’t quite feel like it’s going to slip out of my hand, but both of our phones have spontaneously slid off of what seemed like perfectly stable and level furniture. We were going to get protective cases anyway, but we both put the ones we wanted on our Christmas lists rather than immediately ordering them.
My Lego brick fix for the phone charger was an abject failure. It didn’t stick very well using the double-sided 3M squares, and wasn’t really wide enough to be secure. And also in that position the charging was intermittent. I took off from a stop, the phone tumbled out and the Lego wound up… somewhere in my car. The new charger should arrive Saturday; hopefully I won’t need GPS before then.
I decided on Square Home for my launcher. At least with the premium features enabled (there’s a 14-day trial that begins automatically; $1.99 a year or $5.99 permanent license), it’s very customizable in terms of layout and colors/theming, and I think it looks quite sharp.
The layout that I’ve set up puts everything I wanted on a single screen. (You don’t have to, and you can in fact set it to scroll through pages in an endless loop.) Most of the disunity in this layout is due to limitations of the widgets I’m using. I might also look for a more complimentary icon set rather than circular bubbles on square buttons. I’m sure I’ll keep tweaking things over time.
I was going to start this part by saying that most of my life I haven’t really paid attention to fashion or felt like I had much of a personal style. But now I recall this isn’t entirely true — there was a phase in high school and college where I wore short-sleeve button-down shirts and even funky ties sometimes, when I didn’t have to. Still, most of my adult life I just defaulted to t-shirts (generally geeky ones) and jeans (or sweatpants when I worked night shifts and had low self-esteem particularly about my own appearance).
When I started coming to terms with being nonbinary, I wanted to try to match my gender expression to my identity a little better. And that meant thinking about fashion, as well as quickly recognizing the difficulties in nonbinary gender expression.
(Briefly: society really only recognizes masculine vs. feminine, and this language is used even in nonbinary and gender nonconforming circles when referencing appearance. “Androgyny” can be somewhere in between, but to what extent and how that works is dependent on social context and your own mostly unalterable physical appearance. “Unisex” in clothes is almost synonymous with “men’s” although it says nothing about gender when an AMAB person wears it. There is not really anything that reads as off-axis from a masc/fem spectrum unless it’s so weird it only reads as weird.)
And also at that time, the LGBTQ+ community was still very much getting its shit together about trans and nonbinary issues (and how they interact). The stereotypical “Thing1 trapped in Thing2’s body” trans narrative was a blunt instrument and it didn’t fit everybody, and it took a while to recognize that other narratives about both identity and dysphoria were not threats to trans validity.
But in 2024, while the transphobes are certainly more active than ever, and by the way, fuck those people… some of the ducks have aligned within the community. There are places where you can ask for nonbinary fashion tips and share looks. There are designers and retailers catering to nonbinary and gender-nonconforming people in various ways; some of them radical, some of them much more subtle and everyday.
So, I’m in that process of working stuff out and feel a bit more hopeful about it this time around. Looking over advice, going through the clothes I have but set aside to cull them and gather notes about fit and put some thoughts together, doing a little scouting and shopping, ordering some jewelry. Apparently, today I accidentally threw together a decent outfit that looked intentional just for working from home. That felt good to hear.