So on Sunday, the second day of my kids' holiday without me, I woke up nice & early and decided to take advantage of that opportunity to go to the gym early in the morning before the sun heated it up to unbearable levels. I dunno what the problem is at the gym, but they seem allergic to using their aircon system so it often gets ridiculously hot in there, making it difficult for me to exercise.
Well, it turns out that the gym is not only blissfully quiet at 8am on a Sunday, but it's also nicely chilled. The cheap bastards seem to be using their aircon at last (pity it takes a heatwave to convince them to turn it on!) so I spent a nice, relaxing hour perving over Quinto on Heroes on my iPhone whilst cycling on a recumbent bike. For this particular workout I have to lie to the machine, because the Fat Burn workout I do is based on a certain percentage of your maximum heart rate according to your age, but if I tell it my real age there is absolutely no challenge to it whatsoever, to the point where I might as well sit on the sofa eating bon-bons for that hour. So instead, I tell the machine that I'm 19 years old so that I can work up a sweat without getting out of breath, and after an hour at that level of intensity I feel like I haven't been wasting my time.
After the gym I went home for a couple of hours before popping out to do a spot of shopping. I got some laundry done and did the dishes (yay! domestication!) and then spent the afternoon trying to figure out whether I should sleep, play a game or watch TV. TV won out when I found The Rocky Horror Picture Show in my DVD collection and decided to watch it.
I'll never forget the first time I saw Rocky Horror; I was 13 years old and had slept over at my friend's house the night before. Her parents are a bit weird* - ok, her whole family is a bit weird - and they'd hired Rocky Horror on video because (I think) it had just been unbanned, but anyway they wanted to watch it and they didn't have any problems with their kids - or other families' kids - watching it too.
So poor, innocent little me sat there at age 13 watching this incredible thing on the telly. To be perfectly honest, I didn't quite make the link between the trans* stuff on the screen and my own trans* feelings (mainly, I think, because all the gender-bending stuff in the movie seemed to be about yearning to be female), but that refrain from the song at the end - "Don't dream it... be it" - made a huge impression on me and I stored it at the back of my mind for many years, where it would eventually come to haunt me. Huh, as I recall, later on that day whilst still reeling from the hypersexuality and genderbendery I'd just seen at my friend's house, I slammed my left thumb in the car door, severely and permanently damaging my nail. Yeah, that was a very memorable day all round.
So anyway, I watched it again on Sunday night - as a fully out, transitioning trans man. I cried at certain points, and found other points very inspiring. All-in-all, it was like visiting an old friend.
By the time I'd finished watching the movie it'd become too late for me to have a snooze, so I made pizza & washed it down with some wine. Then spent the rest of the evening chillin', watching crap TV until I eventually went to bed.
* Her dad was a pornographer, and her mother was a Nana Mouskouri impersonator. Yup. I had some awesome childhood friends.
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