We had made plans to go hiking and stargazing at Sky Meadows State Park. At the time, she was just a girl I had been on a few dates with. I was exploring lesbianism for the first time - in a promiscuous fashion - so there were a few people like that. As for her, we had connected 4 months prior over a queer not-dating app called Lex. She wanted to go to trans night at a local queer bar but was anxious about going alone, so I offered to accompany her. We first met in person at that trans night on January 3rd, 2023. It went well.
Anyway, on that fateful Spring day, I was dressed like a lesbian. I'm always dressed like a lesbian on account of being a lesbian who wears clothes, but in this instance I mean I was wearing a flannel shirt. I was excited about going on this date and wanted her to think I was cute, so I set an alarm to get up early and put on makeup.
Light pink baseball cap to keep the sun off.
Cute lil' heart necklace.
Grey v-neck.
Looking gay 👍
I drove over to her house and picked her up. Then we drove about an hour to the park. Then we hiked up the park. I say "up" because it was quite a steep slope. I have poor endurance so it winded me quite a bit. Eventually we reached a bench with a view and chose to sit there and recuperate for a while. She asked me to be her girlfriend. I said yes. I made a bitsy game about it. It was kind of a big deal to me.
After we finished hiking about the park, the sun was setting, and we realized that the park closed after dusk. This was problematic for our stargazing plan. We ended up driving just outside of the park, parking the car in a spot that seemed chill (side of the road near a house in the middle of nowhere) and laid down on the blanket she brought, looking up at the night sky, until we got too cold and went home. And that's how my first date with my new girlfriend concluded.
May 30, 2010
When I was a teenager I was in a program called School of Rock (SoR). SoR is a music education program for highschool students and younger. It's where I learned to play music, a lifelong passion of mine. After some time in the program, I successfully auditioned for the house band, a group comprised of the more advanced students. The core conceit of SoR is that students would practice songs for a season - several months - and then perform them live, like a real life rock show.
House band students performed more songs more often. It was almost like being on tour, I imagine, except without the part where you sleep in a van or on the floor of strangers' homes. My parents would drive me to all kinds of places to play, like Washington D.C. and Goshen, Virginia. Goshen was certainly the biggest concert I ever played as part of house band, and likely the biggest concert I will ever play in my life.
I do not know the exact headcount. Or even the approximate headcount, really. I tried looking it up but I cannot find any information on this concert on the Internet outside of the video of us playing. Google's AI assistant even told me "there is no direct evidence of a concert in Goshen in 2010," which is bemusing. The concert was for the "Boy Scouts National Capital Area Council's 100th Anniversary Camporee," so there were hella boy scouts in attendance.
April 3rd, 2016
Pound 2016 was a tournament for the video game Super Smash Brothers Melee for the Nintendo Gamecube. The game had been a childhood favorite, but I renewed my interest in it around 2014. That's when I ran into the competitive scene for the first time at the community college I was attending to learn about music recording.
Pound 2016 took place at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Tysons Corner, Virginia. There was a publicly available grand piano. I did not play it because at that time I had not familiarized myself with keyboard-based instruments. I had to get up early to attend the first day, April 2nd, as a competitor, but all I did was get bodied in pools by a Falco named Nutsack. I was never particularly good by the standards of the Northern Virginia scene.
I had already been occasionally wearing feminine clothing in public for several years at that point, but had only just begun approaching the idea of myself "being a woman." On the second and final day of Pound 2016, I decided to not only go out en femme but also to present as a woman. Realistically, all that meant was that I wouldn't tell people I "was a guy." I wore a long skirt that my Internet boyfriend had purchased for me and asked my mom to do my hair. She told me I looked like a librarian.
People were kind to me at the tournament. I remember one guy asking me if I played Melee when I was a little girl. I also remember ESAM telling me I sounded like I was sick. (I wasn't, I just had/have a vocal disorder.) I used the womens' restroom, maybe for the first time? The gender euphoria I felt on that day helped push me into beliving that taking HRT was the right decision for me.
