The "Why" of Rye

I’ve had the urge to sit down and write a little about my crossdressing the last couple of days. It’s not something I blog much about much these days now that I openly talk about it and furthermore actually do it. But a few things have interested me about it recently that I’ve as of yet not found a way to translate into my act about it and I plan to write a handful of blogs about it in the near future. For now I’m going to focus on the thoughts I have about the relatively new experience it has been in my life to actually be open about it.

What continues to surprise me to this day is how much most people don’t seem to care about it at all. It’s only been a little under a year since I really went public with it, posting pictures to my facebook and talking about it in my act and it still surprises me how little an impact it has really had on my life in regards to friendships and relationships and such. Before revealing it I was convinced I’d lose friends over it or have people treat me weirdly at the least, but for the most part people just kind of write it off as another of my many peculiarities. Which, frankly is awesome, thought also frustrating when I think of how much of my life I wasted on needless anxiety over the unknown of what would happen. Since my revelation I haven’t had a single bout with insomnia, something I dealt with since I was a teenager, and I have no doubt that there’s not a connection there somehow.

I think the thing I was expecting the least was just how many times I would actually have to “come out,” about it. It makes sense that I have to do it a bit here because no one really knows me here, but there’s a lot of people in my life who I was surprised didn’t “get the memo.” Before last year, I assumed that once I started crossdressing at shows the gossip gates would open and people who knew me would hear it through the grapevine and I’d get ribbed for it the way comics often do. Instead, I’ve created the occasional awkward moment of disconnect when assuming someone knows about it and dropping mention of it in casual conversation as if it was common knowledge and then needing to back up a few paces.

It’s always a strange conversation too because at the end of the day we’re really just talking about clothing preferences, and so there’s not much to actually say about it outside of the initial revelation. Sure, there’s the occasional follow up questions in regards to things like sexuality or underwear, which are easy to answer, straight, and yes, but then there’s some that are harder to really put to rest in conversation. Someone will ask me “Why?” and I’ll answer, because I like it. And then it is awkward because I think I have answered the question, but they do not. So I’ll say “I’m a bit of a crossdresser,” and then it is awkward because I think I have answered the question, but they do not.

Just the other day my friend Maria commented that someone had asked her why I do it. Maria has known about it a lot longer than most of my friends, but she found herself not really knowing the answer. The fact is, I don’t know the “Why” myself. Do I have theories? Sure. But sometime in the last couple of years I stopped caring about the why. I’m 28 years old, and this is something that has been a part of me my entire life, I’m comfortable with it, I don’t feel like it’s anything to be embarrassed about and at the risk of sounding a little egotistical in the process, I think I actually can throw a pretty nice look together when doing it.

With that in mind, I think the reason that the “why” conversations feel so tedious to me is that when someone asks me why I’m wearing a skirt, I’m starting to just answer “Because I have the legs for it,” and that both of us will feel like I answered the question.

Driving Me Mad!!!

The traffic in LA sucks. But you know where else the traffic really sucks? Everywhere. That’s right Hollywood, you’re not special, you gather people into a major city and guess what, it’s going to take a long time for the mass group to move from one area of town to another. Before moving here people drilled into me how bad the traffic was going to be. I was led to believe I’d spend hours in traffic to go five miles and get mugged. But the fact is, the only times I’ve ever had to sit in traffic for more than a reasonable amount of time, the only times I’ve ever truly *sat* in traffic with no forward motion whatsoever have been where there has been a serious accident on the road that has stopped us from moving.

It’s not the traffic that sucks here, it’s the drivers. And I don’t even mean to say they’re particularly worse at driving than in other cities, but rather that they just suck as people. There’s something about getting behind a wheel of a car in Los Angeles that instantly transforms a person into an asshole. I think it’s because people spend so much of their time outside their car being fake that when they finally get behind the wheel the darkest, most vicious parts of their personality are just screaming to be unleashed. On a regular basis, I will hear someone honk at an intersection for the first car to go, while the light is still changing. I’ve been honked at for having the audacity to pause and let a stranded left-turner go so they don’t get stuck in the middle of the intersection. I’ve heard someone call my friend Maria the c-word because they were mad they had to wait for her to pull out a parking space she was wedged into. And absolutely no one here does the courtesy wave to a driver who lets them over.

But what really drives me crazy are the occasions where someone actually gets mad at me because they were wrong. Yesterday I had a driver in the right hand lane refuse to let me over for three blocks despite leaving my blinker on and making many attempts to get over. When I finally gave up trying to get over and punched my steering wheel in anger, the guy screamed at me from his window, asked me if I wanted to pull over and fight over it, and then he spit on my car. Let me reiterate again, this guy spit on my car because he cut me off. Today, the same thing. I was trying to find a parking spot, found one on the left hand side of the steet, and so I flipped on my blinker and started to pull into a driveway to turn around and park, and the car behind me decided that instead of waiting for me to turn, he would dart around me into the oncoming traffic lane, almost T-boned me as I turned, and then he honked his horn at me and threw me a double dose of middle finger. Let me repeat that. This guy got mad at me because he almost hit me when I was in front of him and he was driving in the ONCOMING TRAFFIC LANE.

That’s all I have to say about it, and I know what you’re thinking, “Is this really the end of this blog entry? Come on Rye, we just read three paragraphs of this thing and you don’t have the decency to wrap it up in some poignant way? ” You’re right. I wrote this blog wrong, and hey, go fuck yourself!!

Awkward Moments with Famous People

Another title for this entry could be "I really need to start blogging again," which is probably the most frequently written phrase in any blog I attempt to keep. Here goes yet another attempt.

I've been in LA for almost a week now, and mentally it definitely feels better than my last attempt to move here. Turns out spending most of your time on a couch watching syndicated reruns on broadcast TV, while leaving a laptop open to a blank word document and calling that "writing," is not the best way to handle a move to a new city. This time I'm keeping those blank documents open at coffee shops in different parts of the city that I'm driving to. Today I'm at a Coffee Bean in Studio City, but I've also not written at such places as the Bourgeois Pig, Solar de Cahuenga, and Aroma Cafe. Seriously cannot recommend these places enough for slacking off on your life passions.

The fatal flaw of this city though may be the fact that it is already so beautiful that it makes it kind of hard to get too down on yourself for being unproductive. I mean I'm sitting right now at an outdoor cafe with a full view of palm trees and attractive people. So what if I never finish this screenplay? Who needs self respect when you've got sunscreen?

I've met two famous comedians in the last week and both encounters couldn't have been more awkward, so that's fun. I've always fancied myself as someone unfazed by famous people because I've met so many comics over the years and had cool relaxed conversations with them, but it turns out the vital ingredient in those scenarios was the fact that we were working together at a comedy club. It's easy to feel like someone is a peer when I'm working with them, not quite the same when I run into them on the street while they're walking their dog and all I can stammer out is "Um.. I hate to be this guy, but.. lot's of respect," which wouldn't really be that bad were not preceded and followed by the multiple minutes of awkward silence and then walking down the street way too fast in what was a blatant attempt to escape from the whole scenario. Seriously, I probably should have just kicked Dave Foley in the shin and ran away.

Beer Battered Kittens

So PETA has launched a new campaign to stop people from fishing and eating fish.  Their plan is to rename fish "Sea Kittens" and yes, it is for real.  This isn't someone making a satirical campaign to mock PETA, this is for real.  Setting aside the irony thatPETA kills a very high amount of cats in their shelters, I just find the whole thing hysterical.  Because if you look at their site, there is a lot of production value in it, they clearly spent a lot of time working on it, probably hired a design contractor to do the site, had creative meetings on the "Sea Kitten bedtime stories" and the "make your own Sea Kitten" function, which by the way includes amongst the things you can dress your own Sea Kitten in, a set of swim floaties, which I'm pretty sure would kill a fish, as they tend to want to remain below the surface, and you know, continue to breathe. 

But what makes me laugh the most about the whole campaign is this:  It's made me eat fish.  I've eaten fish three times in the last five days, and I think I'd eaten it maybe five times in the past year before this.  And I'm not doing it out of some asshole attempt to spite PETA, I'm not saying screw them I'll eat more fish.  Reading their site last week just made me feel a craving for fish, it made them look more appealing than usual. 

I first ate a fish sticks TV dinner from my freezer on thursday, ate a fish sandwich at a pub-style restaraunt on saturday night, and then had a Filet-o-Sea-Kitten at McDonalds last night.  And they were all AWESOME.  I had sort of forgotten how good a fried fish filet could be, but PETA made me crave a little tartar sauce, with a hint of malt vinegar and hot sauce on the breading. 

It almost makes me curious how their land-dwelling cousins taste...

I don't care how many free worlds you lead, this kid needs to do her homework

So I figured it was about time I got back to blogging. I had sort of let this blog go after focusing so much of my blogging efforts on the Something Something Burt Ward blog, which is pretty much dead. It wasn't officially killed, just "de-emphasized" but since the last entry on that site was in mid-september, and it was by me, I think it's fair to assume there's not much change it'll have a re-birth any time soon.

So yeah, Obama is President-elect. I'm obviously very excited about this, on a small scale, it's just nice to finally have voted for someone who won a presidential election (I'm looking at you Gore and Kerry!) but also, as has been said and in far more eloquent ways than I can, it is amazing to have lived at this moment in history. I had a discussion with my friend Jeff Burgstrom at a show on Wednesday about how sorry we felt for the people who were so focused on the partisan politics of the matter that they wouldn't be able to appreciate the sheer weight of the moment itself.

One thing I found funny though is today I was reading an article on Huffington Post regarding the schedule of President-elect Obama, including his first official press conference and a transition economic meeting to discuss the current financial crisis and how to approach it come January. However, before that newly elected President and his wife are attending parent teacher conferences at their daughter's school.

Can you imagine the sheer absurdity of being a teacher who has to sit down with a man who was just elected president in one of the most historic elections in history, and talk to him about how his kids are doing in school the same week as said election? Three nights ago this guy made Oprah cry and today you have to tell him that Malia needs to focus more on her math homework.*

Don't get me wrong, I understand the importance of parent teacher conferences in regards to the education of children, it's just funny (funny weird, not funny ha-ha) for me whenever you see politicians doing normal mundane things. For over a year now Barack Obama has been more of a symbol than an individual person, but the fact is, despite his new job and iconic status, he's still a father. It's not exactly as mundane as it would be for him to be heading down for an oil change, but it still made me chuckle.

*Pure speculation, I don't have any actual knowledge of how good or bad Malia Obama is at math.

Awkward Moment Theater

When I was in New York last year, I wrote sketches for a group called New Media Comedy. Some of them were performed live in the 2007 New York Underground Comedy Festival, and now three of them have been filmed and placed on NMC's Myspace page. Apparently they're really big on the concept and are going to produce some more sketches for it and maybe do some live shows using this as the glue. So even stuff that I'm not going to write will have my name on it. Ah, the "Created by" credit.

Here are the three that have been produced so far. I'm really happy with two of them especially. One has some creative changes that I totally understand but a joke I was on love with got cut. But it is much closer to my original vision than the other set of scripts I had produced by someone else, so for that I am happy. Although the other people paid me, so there's a tradeoff I suppose. But that is "The Biz" I guess, better to learn it now. But here without further rambling by me, is Awkward Moment Theater:

Awkward Moment Theatre 1


Awkward Moment Theatre 2


Awkward Moment Theatre 3

I am (an) Iron Man (fan)

Iron Man is a character that I never in my history of comic book fandom cared about. When talk first started circulating about an Iron Man movie, my thought was “I guess they’re hitting them all eventually,” considering that we’ve already been subjected to Ghost Rider and Daredevil/Elektra. Especially now that Marvel has founded their very own studio so that they can produce movies themselves instead of selling the rights and points on the back end to others, it seems fairly certain that their catalog of heroes isn’t going to be closing itself off to the multiplex any time soon.

But after seeing Iron Man, I’m sort of ok with that. Provided of course, that the movies they make are more like Iron Man and less like the Fantastic Four franchise. It isn’t that Iron Man is any amazing special film, but it isn’t terrible. In the spectrum of superhero movies, it falls somewhere maybe slightly behind the first X-Men, but well in front of the awful third one. It isn’t Spiderman II, Hellboy, or Batman Begins. But it certainly isn’t Daredevil.

There is one thing and one thing alone that makes Iron Man such an enjoyable movie. Robert Downey Jr. The script is ok, and Jon Favreau does a pretty decent ass job in the director’s chair for it too, but it is Downey that carries the weight of the movie on his metal clad shoulders. He plays Tony Stark with such a flair for delightful bastardness, yet does not fall short at the moments when he must also show real emotion, real conflict as his character realizes his place in the world.

Downey brings to the table the most enjoyable performance in a popcorn movie since Johnny Depp set sail as Captain Jack Sparrow in the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie. Despite Stark’s personal conflicts, he is the least angst-ridden super hero in recent memory, delighting in every moment he spends refining and eventually kicking evil ass in his suit. It is an interesting twist on the paradigm of the costumed hero that Stark is more weighed down by the impact on the world he has created as a normal person, albeit a larger than life normal person, than he does as a costumed crusader. His joy in being a superhero reminds us of something often forgotten in many of the overly dark failures in comic book adaptations the last few years, the reason so many little kids want to be superheroes in the first place, it looks kind of fun.