"Seven Years in the Making"
Avengers/How I Met Your Mother crossover (kind of)
Maria Hill, Nick Fury, Phil Coulson; 1,980 words
Rated PG for language; no spoilers

 We can’t send you out there with an incomplete backstory. How many agents have you seen ripped to shreds because all they’ve had is a fake name and a fictional mother-in-law from Missouri? Your cover has to be a whole person. Robin has to be a whole person.”

Maria Hill spends seven years undercover as an average New Yorker.

( He stole a blue French horn, sir! )

When I was sixteen, we came down to Kansas City on Columbus Day weekend because my cousin Mary was getting married. My cousin Lisa, with whom I am very close (the cousin who came to stay with me this past summer, no less), had just turned five, and she - well, let's just say that Lisa went through a phase where she utterly and completely lacked a filter. Of any kind.

Her younger brother, Jake, was only a toddler - maybe 18 months old - and I was helping my aunt out with the kids. My aunt, it is important to note, is 4'11" when she stands up at her straightest. She's petite by every last definition of the word. At the time, I was already my full height (5'8") and weighed in at probably 180 pounds. Needless to say, it was a bit of a mismatch.

The dinner was buffet-style and since my aunt needed an extra hand, I got up in line with her and the kids. Jake got tired of walking, and I offered to carry him. As we stood there, Lisa evaluated the situation and said, "Mom, Kate looks more like a Mom than you do because she's so much taller."

I don't remember what my aunt said, exactly, but it was something along the lines of, "Oh, well, you know, Kate is so tall."

But like I said, Lisa was five. And had no filter.

Which is why, in view of the whole buffet line, she announced, "And her boobies are a lot bigger, too!"

I still crack up when I think about that. Like, sorry, but I'm a teenage boy on the inside and it always makes me smile.

This week, Lisa found, scanned, and posted a few pictures of she and I from when she was much younger, and I thought to go with this story, I would share them. ( Interestingly, I was much younger, too! )

Okay, I thought you could vote anonymously, but you can't. So! Feel free to log on as a sockpuppet or something ridiculous if you want to feel more private, but know that I am the only one who will view any detailed results and I won't because, well, that's going to scare you off, isn't it? I'm voting in it, too, and trust me, I AM NOT VERY CLEAN.

That said, THE BATHING POLL.

Poll #1612501
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: None, participants: 68

Generally speaking, I :

In an average week with nothing unusual happening, I shower or bathe:

I use shower gel or some other cleansing product:

I use shampoo or other hair-cleaning product (if you wash your hair independently of bathing, please answer per hair wash):

I use conditioner other other hair-maintaining product (same conditions apply):

If I know I am in a situation where I will not have to be seen outside the house for several days (weekend, vacation, et cetera), I shower/bathe:

Hi, all!

I'm doing a survey for a colleague and would really love it if you weighed in. I won't be giving her information about who exactly you are (example: if amazonqueenkate says "yes" to question #1, I won't actually be telling her that!) but I want general information.

Please link the hell out of this if you could. Thanks!

Poll #1461283 "Tons of Fun"
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 99

If your significant other called you "tons of fun" (exact context: "Come over here, tons of fun!"), would you take it as a commentary on your weight?

If you'd gained 10-15 pounds in the last year and your significant other called you "tons of fun" (same context), would you take it as a commentary on your weight?

Did your answer change in #1 and #2?

Demographic questions. I am a:

My sexual orientation is:

My marital status is:

My age is:

I guess there's this thing on LJ called 14 Valentines that some people are doing, responding to fourteen different topics for the first 14 days of February, topics that mostly deal with feminism and sexuality. Body image was yesterday and today is transgender/transsexual issues.

One of my LJ friends posted that she didn't understand transgender issues. I'm not criticizing her. In fact, I think that's probably a pretty common reaction. I mean, if you're comfortable in your own skin, if you've never felt like you're fundementally wrong somehow, how can you really understand feeling that way? Especially given that we're told that we're born as what we are -- not only gay or straight, but male and female -- and adjustments, changes, awkwardness, they come of our breeding, not of our blood.

When I was growing up, I hated being a girl. From the time I was four on, my mother had to bribe or cajole me into playing with other girls. In preschool, I had friends who were twins, and I was eventually banned from hanging out with them because the boy and I would go and get in trouble together and I would refuse to play with the girl. In kindergarten, all my friends were boys. It carried on, with the exception of Katie (who I still talk to today), through most of elementary school. My mom would arrange playdates with the girls in my class or Girl Scout troop and I would go exactly once before citing the reason I didn't hang out with them was that they were "boring." Never a problem with Eric, Eitan, Scott, and Kevin, the four boys who lived within a block of me and who were with me for all those important rights of passage: first rated R movie, first independent trip walking to Wal-Mart and 7-11, learning to rollerblade and swim, beating Sonic the Hedgehog on the Sega Genesis. My mom once nearly killed me when I was eight because she'd dressed me up for a Girl Scout field trip in my brownie outfit (brown jumper, brown sash, brown shoes, with a pink turtleneck and pink tights), and, on my way home from the field trip, I went to my friend Sam's house and we were making up adventures in his living room and I tripped and tore my tights wide open. My mother also used to have meetings with my teacher and the school social workers about how I didn't have enough friends. What she meant, of course, were female friends. (And I guess, from a mother's perspective, it was worrying; in third and fourth grade, I used to try to kiss my female classmates. A lot.)

The few times I was in trouble in school came out of the same sort of social hodgepodge; I once wrecked something a bunch of the boys in my class were working on because they wouldn't let me join in, and I once kicked straw in Courtney Schultz's face for what I can only qualify as "absolutely no good reason except the boys were doing it." In fifth grade, when all the other girls were obsessed about going to movies in groups with the boys, the only group with boys I wanted to be in was playing Magic: The Gathering. I was the only girl who played. Once, my fifth-grade teacher's son had a bad asthma attack and she brought him to our school until her husband could pick him up. He was a year older than us and jumped in playing Magic. All of the other girls were fawning over how cute he was and all I saw him as was the guy with really good cards back at home.

In eighth grade, I took social dance class, and with it, got a free ticket to the eighth grade dance. I went with my group of girl friends -- and by "group", I mean "all three of them" -- had a miserable time, danced with one boy once, and then my mom picked me up. On our way home she asked if I wanted to stop by Eric's house, because his dad (a classical pianist) had released a new CD and she wanted to stop by and give him her congratulations. When I asked if I could change first she gave me crap about it, so I went in my fake-velvet dress with the sparkles.

When I found Eric and Eitan, who were playing Sega in Eric's room, Eric looked at me and told me it was weird to see me as a girl. I was mortified. Not complimented but embarrassed because I didn't want him to see me like that. A year later, Eric told a group of the guys that he "loves Kate like a sister but wouldn't mind having sex with her if she'd let me" and I was more complimented by the sister part than the sex part.

I don't know if this just means I'm a crappy girl or not. I wear skirts and makeup now, sure, but I vastly prefer wearing crap clothes (or at least pants) and going around without a bra. In fact, I would be more comfortable in a world where I didn't have to wear a bra, or a shirt, or do my hair, or shave. I hate my period in a way that goes beyond "it sucks" to "I don't see the point of it and it's disgusting." I have a reoccuring dream in which I am a man, though I don't have it as much as I used to, and it doesn't freak me out. When I have fandom dreams, I often dream I'm a male (Ianto, for instance), rather than a female.

I'm not a secret transsexual. But I understand it. I know how it is to feel wrong in your skin, even if my "wrong" doesn't hold a candle to how it really feels. I imagine it's like this, but a thousand times harder, more hurtful, and more difficult. With this, I can go to bed at night knowing that I'm okay with myself as I am. Sure, I suck at being a girl, but I am one. And sure, it hurts that my mother didn't trust me to grow up okay and used to have secret meetings about how I needed to have girl friends. But to go through life with that sense of permanent wrongness, to feel like you were made mixed up, and then exist in a society where the prevailing mentality is, "If you came out that way, that's how you're supposed to be"? That would kill me. It would eat at me in a way I don't think I'd be able to handle.

I can handle the fact that my mother sometimes describes me to people as "the fifteen-year-old boy in my twenty-five-year-old daughter's body." (I've actually adapted that to my own use.) I wouldn't be able to handle that.

So basically: I get it. In some small way. And I admire everyone who feels it and keeps going. I'm not sure I could.

Today is the 12th, which means it's time for Chad Darnell's 12 of 12, my favorite way to spend the 12th.

Now, I'm an English teacher from Tempe, Arizona, but I'm off for the summer. So this is going to be the most horrifyingly boring 12th of the month ever. We had a few moments that weren't completely dull, though, so cheers to that.

( Either way, here we are: The 12th of June )

It's the 12th, and that means it's time for 12 of 12!

For those of you who don't know, I'm a teacher in Tempe, Arizona. (Though the pictures aren't as exciting as they could be. Thanks, school day and federal law!)

( 12 of 12: Today was a pretty sucky day, overall. )