User Profile

Man, I am old. I have been on livejournal for like eight years now; previous journals have been illscientist, all_summer, and "jnnogen" (which just redirects to iphisol), but now this one is the only one I use. There was a time when I would use livejournal to tell you about all sorts of stuff, and sometimes I would make up interviews with bands and politicians I didn't like where they would totally incriminate themselves about being jerks or buttholes. Then for a while I was going through some pretty intense stuff with relationships, gender, drinking too much, being broke, and- um- there was other stuff in there, too, but I forget what it was. I used to be pretty maudlin about it. The great thing about being thirty is that you don't care about stuff the way you used to, y'know?

Nowadays I live in a house in Oakland with a bunch of animals who sleep on top of me, a girlfriend with whom I'm not monogamous but to whom I'm rawther committed, and some other people I like too. I am the famous, popular and accomplished singer/guitarist in the band Angela Chase, which has played San Francisco's Trans March and Fabulosa Fest, among other stuff. Sometimes I play solo shows for my many adoring fans under my name, Imogen Binnie, too. I spend most of my time at work in a little bookstore in Berkeley, where people bring me boxes of books and I look through the books and go, 'I will give you twelve dollars for these ones, and with the rest of them you probably ought to just fuck off.' I like my job a lot.

I used to take activism pretty seriously- the pinnacle was when I was organizing with Camp Trans for a couple years- but mostly now I volunteer with CUAV and read a lot and put on or play the occasional benefit. This thing happened where I wasn't so much of a lady, but I kind of was, y'know? And then I started to be, and then I was, mostly, but it was weird. Nowadays I am. I did activism around that a lot, but the thing about trans activism is that it makes you want to burn down the whole world, because there's a constant influx of new people who need you to give them the 101 all the time, and then there's a million other people who aren't interested in hearing about how they have to stop being a jerk, and you get exhausted explaining the same obvious things over and over all the time, and then also it just becomes easier not to deal with it all the time when you don't have to. And also there's just so much pain to share space with, which gets really hard. That's pretty vague, I know; all I'm saying is that I used to be trying to save the world, but now I'm more interested in letting myself not have to be a hero. Not having to be a hero involves a lot of beer and bike rides.

I grew up in New Jersey and one time Maya Evans gave me a tattoo of it on my neck. Then I lived in New York for a bunch of years, where I learned to be a popular, famous rock star (culminating in my lead guitar role in Strictly Platonic, whose debut album has been in post-production for a few years now), learned which books were good and which ones were stupid, and wrote zines. I still write zines sometimes. The one I do now is called The Fact That It's Funny Doesn't Mean It's A Joke, but mostly I write issues and then don't print them.

Anyway, this is just the long way of telling you that my livejournal might look like a bunch of glib anecdotes about eating stupid things and falling off amplifiers, but underneath the glib, kinda bullshit exterior beats a heart that's done some stuff.