Butch Comforts

I just got finished with what I would call a very enjoyably masculine afternoon. After a slow morning of research and snuggling the cat, I did the following.

• Lifted weights plus 200 sit ups.  Sit ups always feel amazing, no matter how hard the last set is.  Today was the first day I was back to being able to bang out multiple sets of 50.
• Got showered and did the weekly facial shave. The hair above my lip is getting darker, so going more than a week without shaving my face makes me self-conscious… and shaving much more often than once a week makes me break out often.  I threw on jeans, a white tshirt, and a zip up hoodie to relax the rest of the afternoon.
• Went to Home Depot.  Oh, how cliché of me.  When I was under the hood of my ’99 Corolla replacing the spark plug wires to fix cylinder misfirings, I noticed that the terminals of my battery had quite a bit of acid leak/corrosion on them… and as we’re approaching the chilly winter months I want to get every ounce of crank out of my battery on zero degree days. So I needed a small wire brush and figured I’d take some time to scope out prices on components for projects at the girlfriend’s soon-to-be house.
• Cleaned my car battery.  A couple mason jar’s worth of sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) and water, and the sulfuric acid (battery juice) was neutralized and washed away. Bye bye corrosion.  Checked to make sure the bolts weren’t rusted in place in case I do have to replace the battery this winter while wearing giant gloves, a face mask, and snow pants.  A nice older man was working on his ’87 Volvo wagon (that wouldn’t start), he came over and asked if I knew much about cars. I was honest and said that I didn’t know much, just some preventative maintenance and simple repairs… I also pointed to the repair manual for my car sitting on the backseat of my car.

I’m munching on pretzels and having a beer, relaxing.  I’ve played a little bit of guitar hero while the cat dutifully watched. It’s been a very comforting day.  Not the kind of comfort I had last weekend, where I essentially slept all day snuggled up with the girlfriend to recover from life, but the kind of comfort where I’m just relaxing being myself and living.

I’m still blown away by how difficult it was just living and being myself when I resisted transitioning.  I wanted to be masculine, but I was afraid to be a butch man. I had to stay in the butch woman role.  It didn’t fit, and I walked around like my shoes were 3 sizes too small.  There’s no settling for that anymore, I’m going to live comfortably and love it.