June 14th, Wednesday

Well, here i am, finaly back again. It's been almost a month, and i sincerely apologize for not showing myself around here for so long. Actualy, that's not quite true, as you've noticed if you knew my site earlier. I've been working on this site again for the past 2 weeks or so, and you will have seen the new look. I'm quite proud of it, i had to apply my (very basic) photoshop-skills, i had to learn some javascript (just a very little, and mainly i copy-pasted), and i had to bring that all together to make the new look. Special thanks at this place to Natalie, from whom i copied a lot of the design and who aproved my using it. The rebuild isn't finished yet (updates about this on the sitemap page), and i've got a couple of ideas for new content too, which i hope to get around to integrating sometime soonish. That's it as far as the site is concerned.

There's been a lot going on in my life these days. The last update (new haircut) was posted in the midst of a rather dark spot. However, the last couple of weeks have been getting steadily better. 2 weeks ago i officialy started my new job. In some ways it hasn't been that big a change, i'm still in the same building, still working for the same company (though now properly a member of the team), and still have many of the same responsibilities as before. But i've now got a proper desk, and share the office with a very different bunch of people. I'm finaly out from under my old boss (and that's a relief). I now do much of my work unsupervised. My responsibilities are a defined a lot more clearly, and i don't have to stand straight for my old bosses failures any longer. I've kept the virus-protection as part of my job, and am slowly extending this to include other security-issues as well. The real goodie that's coming my way will be keeping the company website up to date. Even though this won't include the design of the site it is cool, and will look very good on my resume. We're also starting a push to educate our users in how to best use their puters, and i'll be spearheading that effort. And i don't have to get my hands dirty fixing hardware-problems any longer (i tell you, that paper-dust which accumulates inside a puter itches!). Of course all this means longer hours, and that means an even bigger raise in salary then i had anticipated, which means that i should be able to afford new clothes and even electro, starting next month. I've also been giving serious thought to getting contact-lenses.

On a more personal level things have been getting better too. I have started dressing again, after what i guess was an almost 2 month period in drab. Last weekend i visited my sister in Zürich, and spent 3 whole days as a girl. We had a wonderful time together, browsing the shops, cooking and eating together, taking care of her boyfriend who had the flu (and who, incidentaly, is the first and so far only person in RL to have only known me as Ruby), watching movies till 4am and then going to check our e-mail. And the whole time i only once noticed anybody looking at me strangely (2 young girls, and i think it was the voice that gave me away). After we bought ice-cream cones (from the italian gelateria, real home-made ice-cream with fresh fruit, the best place for ice-cream i've ever known)(and it had better be, at those prices) and the guy at the counter had again failed to do any double-take or raised eyebrow or anything, i asked my sister what she thought was happening. Wether i really passed that well, or if people were just so fazed that they didn't think it anything worth comenting on, or wether they were just so polite or what? She said that she had noticed some strange looks (which i hadn't), that those however came mainly from my voice, that visualy i passed quite well (i think that i need bigger hips) and that probably yes, many people are just much more accepting of these things nowadays.

Tomorrow i'm invited to dinner by one of my collegues. I went and fixed her puter a while ago, and now she's invited me. I'm very tempted to dress for the occasion, but she doesn't know very much about that side of my life yet. I guess that i'll phone her during the day and ask her how she feels about it, and what she thinks her boyfriend will think about it. I think that it would be neat.

I've gotten several comments by the women at the office admiring my handbag. It's from south america, and richly embroidered. One of them said: I allways see you walking along with your pretty handbag, and swished her hips imitating me. It wasn't nearly as embarrasing as uplifting. That was last week when i got myself invited to join them for lunch.

Oh well, i've got to end this now, and tomorrow i won't be here because of dinner, but i promise you that i'll write more often again now. There's still so much left to say.

Love, Ruby

June 18th, Sunday

Hihi :) My mum gave my a top the day before yesterday. With just shoulder-straps to hold it up. That's the first like that that i've gotten. And now i just had a nice long bath, and shaved all the appropriate bits, and did my hair nicely, and put on this new top and a nice pair of pants with frilly fringes. And then my mum says: "It's amazing how little it takes for you to pass, now you've just got to remember to control your voice." That is so cool. And yes, visualy i do pass quite well, i think. For everyday life i just need to work on my voice a lot.

On thursday i ended up not getting dressed for dinner. I got all caught up in my anxieties, and it's no good forcing things. But i did put on rather androgynous clothing, and make-up, and did my hair nicely, and didn't hide my scars either. I also bought a bunch of huge white flowers, because i thought that would be appropriate. Her boyfriend did the cooking, and he's a marvelous cook. We had a large mixed salad, and then a spicy chinese dish. It was very good, only that i was slow in eating because i was talking a blue streak. Later we had coffee, and then we went out to have a drink, leaving her boyfriend behind to do some work on his studies. Then we met with a friend of hers, and sat in the warm summer night drinking wine, and in my case an orangeade. It was just great.

Later...

What is a Woman?
I had an idea about this question a while ago. I'll have to explain a bit. I used to play chess quite a bit when i was younger, in a club and tournaments and even the swiss championships. Now generaly chess is regarded as a game. However, many serious chess-players define chess as a sport. Now to somebody who hasn't ever played tournament-level chess this might sound quite strange. Where is the phyiscal activity that is so central in almost any sport? What other sport do you play sitting at a table? Chess would appear to have nothing to do with sports. Except that there is a strong phyiscal component in chess, namely endurance. A tournament-level game can take as much as seven hours of intense concentration. And this is phyiscaly demanding. Which chess-player has never stood up at the end of a game and collapsed because he or she was so exhausted that their legs just wouldn't carry them any longer? (okay, this is an extreme, but it does happen) Garry Kasparov, the world champion, says that he invests half his training in phyiscal endurance training. But i'm getting of the point. What i was going to say is, the olympic comitee (at least i think it was them) drew up a list of twenty points that could be used to define if a certain activity qualified as a sport. These ranged from the very obvious "Physical activity" to competitivity and requiring strategy and tactics. To qualify as an olympic sport an activity needs to pass in about 6 or 7 of those categories. Most sports get 9 or 10. Chess gets a record-breaking 19!!! So the olympic comitee added chess to the ranks of olympic sports, and one of the main events in international chess is the chess-olympics. In lots of countries the national sports associations have since invited the chess associations to join their ranks, and chess is becoming more and more accepted as a sport.

Now my thought was this. It is becoming more and more difficult to define who is a woman. On the outside it might seem pretty clear. A Woman has breasts and a vagina and XX chromosomes. Ooops! We are allready in hazy areas. Not all women have XX chromosomes, there is in fact a lot of variation on the XX-XY theme. And breasts too, lots of women have little to no breasts, be it because of an amptuation (breast-cancer) or because they vanished as a side-effect of anorexia or for many other reasons. We can't really use fertility either to define who's a woman, because many woman are infertile, and after a certain age it is indeed the norm. Other criteria might include "long hair" or "wears dresses", "has a soft voice" or even "feels herself to be a woman". So my idea was (finaly we get to the point), what if we created a list of criteria, say 20 like for sports, which define who can qualify as a woman. These would run from the very obvious "vagina", "breasts", "society treats her as a woman" to the fairly obscure "takes submissive roles in partnerships", and could include some rather funny like "swishes her hips as she walks". The idea is to set it up so that practicly nobody can get a 20/20 score, but that any woman could qualify, and that it would leave a place for unconventional women like me and perhaps you to qualify too.

What do you think of this idea? Does it make sense? What do you think the criteria should be? I'd be thankful for any input, please write to me at rubyt@mailandnews.com. Please bear in mind that i intend for this to be only a kind of game.

Love, Ruby

Addendum on the 19th: I wrote "Who is a Woman" in the Texts section, and it includes a form so that you can submit your suggestions directly. I hope to get lots of input there!