Errands in The Hague

Ok, I like some things about The Hague. It reminds me a lot of Middletown, Connecticut, but has many more things going for it. And the music and school communities are both really great. I know a lot of people, I have friends. It's a good time. And it's less than an hour to Amsterdam, but in many ways it's also a small town.

All the sales are going on now. I keep seeing goretex shoes for sale. Some of them are adequately formal to replace my current everyday shoes, which are leaky. So I went into a shoe shop and asked about the shoes I had seen in the window. The shop keeper lead me to the women's shoes, which were clearly not what I had indicated. I said I preferred men's shoes. She said that they were often too wide for women's feet. "I have wide feet." She took me to the men's shoes and gave me no information whatsoever about which were waterproof and kept brining me women's shoes. "How about these?"

I feigned being late to an appointment and escaped. She wasn't hostile, but she was employing passive resistance. I was not going to succeed in finding what I wanted and lack of respect for my identity gets old really fast. This is the second Sunday in a row in which I've failed to run an errand because service employees don't want to give me access to gendered-male stuff.

On the way to the park with my dog, I noticed an underwear store had a poster up of a woman in boxer briefs shaving her face. She was topless and had long hair and was extremely sexualized in a feminine manner. You know, in case there was any question about whether biology is destiny. Clothes might make the man but feminine is female is inescapable.

I got a bunch of shrink stuff in the mail yesterday. It's got pamphlets explaining something or other. I can probably guess at what they say, but they're in Dutch. I could ask somebody to translate them for me, but I'd rather hide under my bed, thanks. I don't know how this is going to help cure my anxiety, since the paperwork is making me want to flee. Cola says that if I disappear and then call her from a pay phone at a North American airport, she's keeping the dog. She's fiendish. I guess flight response isn't the way to go with this one. Maybe I'll fight the letter. Or the doctor. That would go over well.

In completely unrelated news, I've volunteered to start doing sound FX for a Dutch fan-produced Star Trek. I'm a huge geek. I've been wanting to work more with video and this will give me experience. I never thought of myself as a trekkie before, just a viewer, but uh yeah. Lately, I've been looking at where my life has taken me (and is taking me) and thinking "How did I get here exactly? Which way is this train going?" I swear if somebody appeared to me ten years ago and said "in ten years time, you will live in Holland, whine about shoe stores to your blog, and be a trekkie." I would have said, "What's a 'blog'?"