Happy Holidays 2025

Happy Holidays to all

Before we tear the final page of 2025 off the wall calendar, I feel compelled to scribe a few lines that may fall under your gaze. December 28th is my birthday, my 78th actually, and because I'm in a reflective mood I thought I might bore you with a few randomly connected thoughts.

Although I initially put this in an email to 12 or so different folks whom I either love or hold in very high esteem (and of course, both can be true,) I also decided to drop it into a blog post.

Retirement and Saying Goodbye to My Profession

I separated from the day job in July, which freed me up from the mundane duties of delivering software and hours paid for by clients. It didn't blunt my love for software, AI, and other things tech.

The separation was very much unceremonious; the very antithesis of all those old movies where some antiquated white-haired individual -- I'm looking at you Mr. Chips -- sits at an appreciation meal and is given some hideous wristwatch to celebrate 30 years of tedious and soul-destroying service. I simply walked into a drab lobby and dropped all my kit onto a desk and that was it. For me the separation was more than a loss of job, though. It was the erasure of identity; my life’s meaning slipping away like sand through my fingers.

I did get together with some very wonderful friends later (Thanks to Rose and Anitha). It's weird thinking that all the code I wrote and all the sensors and systems are lost in time, and that I left no greater mark on the world than that. But that's the modern world, and especially the world of software.

I did work on a sensor system for the freshwater delivery system from Turkey to Cyprus, and sometimes wonder whether that's still in operation and whether it's of some benefit to the world. I hope so anyway. And I hope that the defensive sensor system that I worked on with one of the most brilliant folks I was privileged to meet (a former Marine) saved any lives after it became operational.

I am still coming to grips with what this newfound freedom means, and am still at this point exploring what this change in life means and what promises and problems it holds. I'm keenly aware of the clock ticking down toward the minute of my last breath, and that tempers my enthusiasm for jumping into anything long term or that requires heavy commitment of time or energy. This may change to morrow, but for now it's an operating principle.

I developed software and did research for 54 years straight, thus one might find it difficult to believe that it's been this easy to cleave the connection I felt for so long to writing and debugging daily. And the answer is both yes and no. My most wonderful department head at BBN influenced my being named to the Engineering Advisory Board at Catholic U. , and I feel a strong pull to pay that forward in some way. That will come, but first, exploring "retirement"!

Activities

Exploring retirement so far has amounted to more travel with trips this year to Scandinavia, Spain, and to the UK. and planned trips to Norway, Sweden and Denmark in 2026. I have mainly Nordic roots, a fact I didn't discover until my daughter Caitlin discovered that much of her DNA was from the Nordic area. When she gifted me an Ancestry kit, I discovered (no shocker) that I had even more Norwegian heritage. I'm trying to reclaim a bit of that with learning Norwegian (or at least the Bokmål dialect), mostly via Duolingo. I'm looking for University level courses in Scandinavian languages but there are few resources alas. I'm also learning Spanish through University courses and that's a bit easier to come by. I'm continuing guitar lessons; I'll always be perfect--perfectly abysmal--but every once in a while, I play something that's somewhat like music and that feels really great.

Additionally, I'm continuing work on my novel, which seems destined to be something that is very cathartic for me: rather than having a burning ambition to write the Great American Novel featuring a transgender protagonist, it's, in part, a way for me to get some of my feeling and a thinly veiled description of some of my life's journey onto the page. The really best authors (Karin Bishop and Ryka Aoki) writing trans heroines are already out there, and my goal is to celebrate them by adding my words to the banned literature of America.

Et Cetera

It's best to take a break and grab a glass of Cabernet Sauvignon before reading the following section. It was exhausting to write, and it will be equally tedious to read.

If you read my CV at Catholic U, cited above, you may notice that I made a point of my pronouns. Some of you also may have seen and wondered about my email signature. The short version: I have known since about age 8 that my gender varied from my “immutable sex assigned at birth,” a phrase I hate with a white-hot passion as it's used by people to hijack and control the language regarding gender variance into a thing it's not and never has been.

People who are ignorant about such things talk about biological sex, sexual preferences, gender identity, and gender expression as though they are somehow the same and as though the choices in these disparate aspects of humanity could only be binary (either X or Y). Rather than going too far down a rabbit hole, a nice backgrounder is at The Genderbread Person, Part 1: Gender Identity.

I'll just leave it at this:

1. Everyone is on a continuum; there are no binaries;
2. Trans people have been around since the dawn of man--anyone ever seen the Sleeping Hermaphrodite, an ancient Roman life-sized marble sculpture, at the Louvre?

   

   Sleeping Hermaphrodite: An ancient Roman marble sculpture; it rests on a marble mattress completed by Italian artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini in 1620.

3. Despite the ranting of politicians, trans people have no interest in dominating cisgender female sports, invading lavatories or locker rooms to rape females (that's the exclusive domain of cisgender males), nor have there ever been any recorded instances of this;
4. Despite the 1,000+ pieces of ill-informed legislation passed in red states, there is no medical evidence that dealing with gender problems in children is abusive (in fact, the opposite, it's life-saving as the suicide rate in untreated post-pubescent trans kids is 4 times the rate for cisgender kids. I could go on through all the letters of the Roman, Greek, Cyrillic, and Klingon alphabets refuting the nonsense spewed by ignorant people, but I'm too busy to argue with stupid.
5. My last words on the topic: Right-wing pols know they can throw this out there like red meat to wild dogs, and doing what they call, "flooding the zone"—writing and social-net posting pure crap at such a rate that it sucks all the oxygen out of the room.

The truth is that in the older population, about 2% of people admit to being trans; amongst my grandkids' generation, the percentage is significantly higher. Part of this is because there's now a vocabulary and volume upon volume of medical evidence that enable intelligent discussion of gender and sexuality. When I grew up in the 1950's, there was- literally- no coverage, no language, no words that described what I was feeling and knowing about myself. There was no reporting of people with trans kids in their sphere. Now we know that Cher, J-Lo, Jamie-Lee Curtis, De Niro, Elon Musk, and a ton of others have trans kids. I mean, Ernest freaking Hemingway had a trans kid for crying out loud, not that anyone would ever have known that.

So winding this long diatribe up, I knew at 8, admitted to myself and a few others at 70, and now could give a crap less what misguided opinions from politicians may hold. I do care about what misguided laws they pass, though; I don't want other kids to go through what I did in my life. Accordingly, I support lawsuits, legislation, and politicians who fight for people like me. I don't want another generation to grow up as messed up and hiding parts of themselves from the world as I did.

I am fortunate to have had the unqualified love of an incredible partner of 53 years. To show you how confusing our vocabulary is, though—still—I guess that means we have been in a lesbian relationship all these decades. In my one heterosexual act in life, I confessed to my once best friend from the age of 12, after a glass of wine, that I had always loved him. He turned on his heel, saying over his shoulder that he didn't know how to deal with such a thing. I lost him forever. I have lost other (male) friends whenever I feel self-indulgent or indignant enough to "confess," but the weird thing is that I have never lost a female friend (bless you, Rose, Heather, Anitha, Sarah!)

Ironically, it was the insanity of the current regime that was the forcing function for my leaving the day job. I had done a "stunning job" (according to the customer) using AI to ensure that decisions from Administrative Courts were complete and sensible. Such a good job, in fact, that the regime-appointed Acting Administrator for the customer wanted me (specifically) to use AI to scrub all references to DEI from the agency's internal and externally facing websites. For me, that would have been like a Jew standing with the Nazis, throwing stones into windows on Kristallnacht. Not happening. I resolved not to be a part of that. Ever. Long story short, a good time to resign rather than be a part of an agenda that would erase people and change the fundamental nature of American society in a way that resets the clock back to the McCarthy Era.

I could go on but dayumm, this has to be giving all of you a headache. So I will end with saying I love you, each one of you, and I hope the road ahead will take you to the places you want to be in life.

Birthday 2025

Our granddaughters, Nutcracker 2025