I’m a girl again.



It was an easy transition. I reverted to one of my female bodies and changed clothes. I’m surprised at how disorganized my inventory is when it comes to clothing. I’ve been using outfits for so long, I don’t know where anything is.

Beginning doesn’t mind. As long as it’s me, it’s love. Not long after I shifted over, we went to one of our usual romantic spots--Inspire Space Park--and gazed at the stars.



Lately, we’ve been exploring by going through all our old landmarks and trying them out to see if they still lead anywhere. Sometimes they lead to abandoned land, sometimes they lead to something other than what the landmark indicates and quite often they lead nowhere at all. Once in a great while, they’ll lead to the thing that the title describes and these we tuck into our folders for future use. It’s not as different from the physical world as it may seem. Businesses close and leave boarded-up buildings behind, the boarded up buildings get mowed down and mixed-use developments built on the spot, and so on. (The Me still mourns a spot that used to be a music venue and is now a clothing store.) It's the same inworld, though it is perhaps different in that land can disappear entirely instead of changing purpose.

I'm sorry about the ads. I let my membership lapse and The Me is on a narrow budget. I'll try to restore some sanity when finances permit.

I met Sacred Singh, as I met many avies in my early days in Second Life, through Miles Montgolfier. Her avie was that of an ethereal blonde, but she openly admitted that she was a much older woman at the keyboard, with grown children and I believe grandchildren as well.

On my first rezday, she was the one I ended up talking to when a relationship I was in reached a crisis point. True to her professional training as a therapist, she did not urge me to break it off, but she did urge me to ask myself what I really wanted, what would make me truly happy and how I could fulfill those needs.

She suggested I use a mirror. Instead, I eventually ended up incarnating as Beginning, and talking to myself that way.

The last time I'd talked to her was on my third rezday. I'd just gone through another dark night of the soul and she again provided her support to me.

November, I'd been phone texting back and forth with Miles about some things for Social Butterfly and Miles dropped the news on me: Sacred had cancer again, and it was spreading rapidly.

There I was (or there The Me was, if you like) curled up in the corner of a coffeehouse with my iPhone, crying openly in grief for a woman I'd never met in the flesh. A tall man in black--a musician of my acquaintance--noticed and was kind enough to stop and hold my hands as I wept and tried to explain to him why.

Last night, I'd booked a suite on the SS Galaxy and was curled up with Beginning for a little quality time when Miles popped inworld for a moment. Beginning waited patiently, the way she does, as I IMed with Miles and found out the news--that Sacred had passed away on Saturday.

I sent an IM to GypsyDoctor Donat, who knew her in RL as well as SL and who had been the one to tell Miles about her. He mentioned that Sacred's daughter may take over the account long enough to pass the news on to the avies on her friends list. How strange it would be to see her name one last time in the corner of my screen, even knowing that she's never really coming back.

My third rezday was last Saturday and while I wasn't able to make it inworld until late in the day, I did have a lovely time once I made it in.

( Cut for length and photography )

Beginning has been spending enough time inworld on her own (at my insistence) that she's considering starting a blog of her own to detail her adventures. I'll let everybody here know the moment she does.

I can't seem to stay a girl for long these days. I did shift back to try on a new dress I'd picked up via a FashCon announcement, but that only lasted a day or two before faerie_h was sadistic enough kind enough to point me to the Bare Rose shopping site. Bare Rose, as I have lamented before, is my major SL shopping addiction, because the clothes there are amazingly high in quality and insanely low in price. I grabbed a charmingly rumpled outfit called Albert and fiddled with all the combinations before settling on the red version.

And then, naturally, I called up Beginning and we went out on a date.

She dug through her inventory to come up with an outfit that she felt content with (muttering about how she really needs to do a proper sort of all the clothes she's acquired, since she went crazy with the freebie ganking in her early days) and we decided to try a different jazz club for a change. I hit search, picked one that looked interesting, but discovered that they apparently had a slightly stricter dress code than we were accustomed to. Not that we were dressed all that sloppily, and we certainly aren't lacking for formalwear in our respective inventories, but neither of us felt like changing in the street, so we decided to return at some other time.

We wandered elsewhere and finally decided that what we really wanted was somewhere quiet where we could sit together and just be. And since caliburnsusanto wasn't about, we decided to borrow his island.

Seems Caliburn has gone and rearranged things since our previous Isla Susanto photo session, so weren't able to find the campfire spot where we'd cuddled before. But we did find the gazebo and sat there together.

My screenshots are unable to do proper justice to the beauty of the space there, so I only snapped this one picture:

( It's not that large, but I'm cutting it anyway... )

I think the thing I like about it the most is that it managed to capture one little moment when Beginning is looking at me, an odd quirk of the 'follow the mouse' gaze (which I shan't belabor, lest I unravel the seams of this peculiar tapestry.)

I am pondering the insane notion of spending 24 continuous hours in Second Life and, of course, blogging the hell out of what I find in the process. I will probably have to do it without Beginning accompanying me, so perhaps that is the reason we are gorging ourselves on each other's company while we can. I plan to let everyone know the day if I wind up doing this and am open to any suggestions as to what I might be able to do in the wee smalls of the virtual morning.

One can see it as a risk, when Real Life gets stressful, to find oneself spending a little more time in Second Life than usual. But, then again, Real Life kept me away from Second Life so much that "more than usual" is more like "back to previous levels."

I had a long chat with Beginning about my woes, and she was, as always, understanding and curiously insightful in that way she has.

Lee Ludd was AFK and unable to help me directly, but he was kind enough to point me to his website, which provided instructions on how to reconfigure and reinstall the doors. It took several attempts, but I finally got them back to where they were in my reprimmed house.

I've discovered that my new configuration comes with some slight disadvantages in terms of texturing--I'm forced to keep floor, walls and ceiling all the same color--so I rezzed myself a rug and did a little creative texture work with some building class materials. It'll do for now.

I ended up going on a maddened shopping spree, buying chairs and wings from Seven's Selections and a couple of goth outfits from Bare Rose. Then I called up Beginning (if you will) and took her out on a date.

We settled on the Blue Note, had a nice little ballroom dance for a while and then went to the boardwalk, where we made a marvelous discovery. There's a spot where you can rez a couples walk so one person can walk for both avatars as they hold hands together.

Anybody who has been following along will understand why this was such a perfect invention for the pair of us. There was also a version for purchase--I bought the 'holding close' one--that we should be taking advantage of in future.

So we walked together and had a swoony moment in the park (the Blue Note sim is one of the best spots for romance that I know of in Second Life) and then got a notice from Quantum Tribe Laboratories that they were having a DJ round robin, so we decided to go out with a bang and headed there for a while. Things started to get slow and pixelly, so we bowed out graciously instead of tempting the crashmonster.

It felt good to have that. It seems even romances like ours need a little rekindling now and then.

So I guess I've officially used up my fifteen minutes of blogosphere fame, now that New World Notes has done a piece on this most peculiar relationship between Beginning Thursday and Yours Truly.

Hamlet Au had linked to this blog previously, as it turns out, remarking on the Augmentationalism versus Immersionalism debate and linking to entries by sophrosyne_sl and myself as illustrations. (The entries in question, if you don't feel like clicking through to Hamlet's article, are here and here.) At that point, the relationship between Beginning and myself was still being defined, though I think it was not long after we'd been partnered.

I think Hamlet did a fine job of summarizing things, though saving the truth about my gender until the very end did apparently set at least one person off. And it did give a slightly wrong impression, since my profile clearly indicates that I don't confine my avatar to one gender. But I do understand the literary reasons, if you will, for his choice of pronouns and I don't fault him for that.

So if you've wandered here from New World Notes, welcome and enjoy. I hope my odd little musings about SL will keep you diverted. And if you come across either of us inworld, feel free to say hello.

We cannot be seen in crowds.

That, after trial and error, is what I have discovered about Beginning and myself. In sparsely populated sims, with perhaps one or two other people, we can linger as long as we like. But if we hit the dance floor and too many others are there, the crashmonster will pounce on one or both of us.

caliburnsusanto was kind enough to take some pictures of Beginning and me together at his palatial grounds at Isla Susanto.

( Large pictures lurk beyond this point . . .  )

Well, when you host a discussion on the nature of identity in Second Life, I guess it comes with the territory, doesn't it?

My second little salon discussion at the Saturn Grill went quite well. I had a little more lead time to advertise and I at least tried to put out a Notice to the Quantum Tribe Laboratories Group, but was thwarted by the fact that I, personally, was not at that membership level, so I settled for a quick announcement in Group Chat and left it at that.

( Cut for revealed secrets, circle-breaking and all that jazz . . .  )

Thanks to all who showed up and tune in next week! At GypsyDoctor's suggestion, this week's discussion will be about time in Second Life--how much time we spend in it and how much time is worth it. (I'll link to the Event listing when it goes up officially--I just posted it this morning.)

Sunday afternoons are optimal SL time for my schedule, which is why I have my Dreamer's Circle meetings then. The membership has dwindled down to myself and Alanagh Recreant, and was forced to become more unofficial since Alanagh reached her Group limit.

I've offered to do a regular 'newbie class' at Quantum Fields, and it's looking like Sunday mornings, a little before my Group meeting, will work best.

I just realized that I phrased that first sentence a bit badly for what I meant, but going back over notecards to post them via my BlogHUD tends to glitch them, so let me plow forward and clarify--Sunday afternoons in my time zone are optimal SL time, tho

Anyway, I was invited to Galatea Gynoid's rezday party at Extropia and decided I could meet with Alanagh in IM, as we've been known to do. Alanagh asked if we could do the same, since it turned out she was going to someone's rezday party . . .

You can kind of guess how it turned out. So we were able to meet and say hello to everybody, and do our little goal setting session in IM while dancing.

I love this place.

Also, while I was scoping out possible classroom locations for my newbie classes I noticed that Quantum Fields has some rather nice apartments for rent. I sent word to my darling Beginning Thursday and she jumped at the chance. She'll probably be talkin

I'm not particularly happy with the new viewer, by the way. The little tweaks to the interface are things I'll get used to in time, but the crashing more times in a few days than I had in weeks is not so great. *grumble*
posted by CyFishy Traveler on Quantum Fields using a blogHUD : [permalink]

EDIT: As much as I appreciate the kind comments emanating anonymously from Washington and Indiana, the odd vagueness of the remarks smelled a little too much like spam for my liking, so I deleted them. I understand that not everybody has or even wants a LiveJournal, and thus I allow anonymous comments, but I do leave the IP tracing option over and I have no fear of the delete button. Keep that in mind.