Well. Some news.

It seems I'm not alone in being alone, at least on the weird gender stuff front. Friend of mine at work is quite involved in all of this kind of stuff as well, due to some family issues pertaining to the phenomenon of intersex. I'd happened to mention I had a short story concerning a hermaphroditic character and we started talking, and so I have given her a bunch of my writing to put up on her website. She's also into slash so I gave her my SG-1 stuff. Also gave her Aquaria. So perhaps it will be read by someone, somewhere, sometime. You spend 10 months writing something, you'd like somebody to read it someday. Plus it's somewhere to get Khimaira's Journey out, so to speak. I had no idea where I would have sent it to else. So it's good.

She asked for a bio, so...


By way of a bio -

The short form: My name is Carol E. Meacham, I’m currently 35 years old, I live in Rossville GA with two cats Fuzz and Boo. I’ve worked for the US Postal Service for over 10 years but my real calling in life is writing science-fiction. I’ve written fan-fiction in various universes (Star Wars - Phantom Menace, X-Men, Stargate SG-1) under the name Tilt. I have one book published in electronic format by Mushroom E-Books of Bath, England - title "Machina Obscura". I’ve had one of my Star Wars stories published in a fan anthology called "Force of a Different Color". I’m a member of the World Future Society. I’m an advocate of space exploration, Mars colonization, artificial intelligence and nanotechnology.

The long form: Have you ever noticed how truncated these inside-flap bios are? Someday something like that above is going to be on the inside back flap of one of my books, and people are going to think they know me from that.

Who I am is a lot more than all that I said above. For one thing, I got involved with this website because I happen to have some "issues" concerning gender. For most of my life I’ve been trying to figure out just what the heck I am. Despite the fact that I appear to inhabit an entirely female body I have never really "felt" female. Much of the time, in fact, I seem to oscillate between being androgynous and male in gender identity. I have never had any interest nor much tolerance for what is traditionally considered "female" activities, traits, or behaviors. For a long time I kept waiting for all of this female stuff to "hit" - like one day I’d wake up and suddenly I’d be desperate to wear dresses and make-up, or I’d want to do something with my hair besides just keep it out of my face, or I’d want to suddenly get into sewing or cooking. I kept waiting. And waiting. It hasn’t happened yet. I’m 35. I figure if it hasn’t happened by now, it won’t. I’m comfortable being this amorphous entity, at least most of the time. It’s when I run up against the cultural norms of what I "should" be or do that I question what I am. Left to my own devices, I’m just myself.

I’m also what I refer to as a "lapsed heterosexual" - last summer I finally faced up to the fact that I’m bisexual. I’d been subconsciously censoring that part of myself probably all my life. It took hearing gays, lesbians and bisexuals being refered to as "the ultimate perversion of nature" by a radio talk show host and inexplicably finding myself sobbing at the wheel of my truck to realize that I felt that bad because that guy was talking about me. Since then I’ve been on this continuous realization of how much I’ve been hiding even from myself. I realized I’ve been this way all my life, just that it’s always been beneath the surface. It’s not comfortable. But it’s real.
What saves me and keeps me sane is that great wide open above our heads - the vast unmeasurable distances of a universe we’ve only begun to explore. Science, science-fiction, and writing are my life. The universe is so much more than we can imagine. Humankind can be so much more than we are. And yet here we sit, trapped inside this invisible shell of atmosphere and gravity, seemingly uninterested in the wonders above our heads, apparently content to endlessly cycle between work and sleep like mice in a maze. Sometimes I despair… then I go to JPL’s Mars Rover sites or check on Cassini’s latest pictures and feel a little hope.

My latest grand life experiment involves going back to college for the third time. My current goal is to reinvent myself, as it were, so that my day job and my writing become synergistic - each feeding off the other, so to speak. My dream now is to get a job at either the National Air and Space Museum or NASA. I want a life where I am continually learning about what I love - science, the universe, the planets of our solar system. I want to be part of the solution. I want to live for what I believe all the time, not just when I’m sitting here at my computer. I don’t want to be eighty years old some day and asking myself why I wasted all this time being miserable.

I’m a registered Green. I’m an advocate of same-sex marriage and/or civil unions, polyamory, stem-cell research, global government, renewable energy, Mars colonization, and SETI. My heroes are George Lucas, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, James Burke, Carl Sagan, Art Bell, Richard C. Hoagland, and the Apollo astronauts. Someday I want to walk into a bookstore and see a book I wrote for sale on the shelves.

And that’s about all I can say about that.


I suppose it might be no surprise that there's a lot that goes on in my head that I don't put in this blog. Some of it comes out in my writing. A lot of it began to come out in Aquaria. Some of it I just can't put into words, it's too nebulous. How do you put into words a deep suspicion of yourself? All the vague, half-formed, only very dimly comprehended fears that something has always been deeply wrong with you. All the suspicions and things that just don't add up no matter how hard you try to make them. All the hurting, year after year, day after day, of falling between the cracks, of never fitting in anywhere, with anyone. Of not knowing, never knowing, what you are.

99% of the time I don't talk about any of it. What would be the point? When I do happen to say anything about it people just tell me there's nothing wrong with me or that I'm paranoid. Do people think I like admitting to something that can get me a guest spot on Jerry Springer? No one volunteers to be this way. No one volunteers to be gay or bi or intersex or transgendered. Life is a hell of a lot easier when you fit into society's categories and boxes. I'm a lawful good kind of person. I like boxes and categories. I don't like not fitting into any of them. But I don't. I've learned to do a reasonable facsimile of fitting in, but that's all it is. Just the fax, ma'am. It's like I'm running Linux but I'm porting through a Windows emulator so I can link into the Net. The emulator is just the translation program. The operating system is completely different.

I try not to dwell on it, most of the time. There's nothing I can do about it and I don't want to be thought of as whining or trying to get attention or paranoid or whatever. One thing I've always believed of myself is that one way or another I will take care of myself. No matter what.

Sometimes it makes me glad that Dad's been dead all these years. I get the feeling he wouldn't know how to handle this kind of thing. Since my entire life sometimes seems like I'm living to make him proud of me it just doesn't bear thinking about.