on Oceans, Adventures and Public Tranportation

Written a couple of days ago:

“Ocean in view.  We are in view of the ocean.  This great pacific ocean, which we have been so longing to see. – William Clark”

I blame that on my mom’s constant playing of a music album with Lewis and Clark’s quotes peppered in it.  Nonetheless, here I am, at Newport Beach, California, soaking in the perfect temperatures, letting my feet hit the sand and toes in the water.  Wimpy little Orange County people are all bundled up, but to me this is a second summertime. 

This should be a lesson to me, one which I’ve learned and forgotten now for too many years.  Just let things be.  Go, explore, be agendaless and take every possible thing, from novelty to annoyance, and view it as an adventure.

After arriving at the airport, several annoyances came to play.  The TSA apparently had to test to see if the honey I was bringing to Joe was in fact a bomb.  They almost closed the jar completely, but not quite, resulting in it leaking.  A small bit of honey was lost in the process and a portion of my suitcase is now sticky. 

But you know what was also occurred?  I saw all the theme park brochures and recalled how much I’ve been wanting to go, plus Kyle is not a fan of theme parks so unless it were staring us in the face we wouldn’t, plus Joe is a fan of theme parks, equals delight!  I hope we go to one this weekend.

Since Joe is predictably in work, I had more than a few hours to burn.  I live in the mountains these days, but I was born at the sea (Newport Hospital to be exact, the original, erm in America, Newport), and some of my most cherished memories were borne of the sea.  So I had it in my mind to explore some stretch of the sea. 

There are taxis, but that would be expensive, and even if I were moneybags mcgee, that does take away some of the adventure.  I have determined, in some cases (not all, see Osaka, New York, Europe) individual transportation is more convenient.  In all cases, public transportation is far more adventurous.  First there is the part about figuring out where to go, and how to get there.  Then there is the ability to actually see what you are going through and appreciate it.  Finally, there is that hint of danger, not real danger, but the possibility of failure; the possibility of not ending up where you intended to be.  That makes it more like a game than a cardboard cut objective. 

Yet I had a very hard time finding out where the local buses picked up.  I suppose it should have been expected, but when I asked airport employees where the bus was, they gave me a very queer look that suggested “What is this ‘boos’ thing you are referring to?”  No matter.  It was another adventure- to find out how to get where.

A lack of convenience forces you to be happy with your result.  How many times have I driven around to find the perfect spot I am looking for, be it park or restaurant.  When you are going by bus or by foot, every spot it perfect, because it is the one that is there.  It is the one that calls to you the most and will call to you the most for the next 5-10 minutes, depending on how speedy you are.  That is, you give your surroundings a chance to actually speak to you.

I used to do this a lot in Japan.  Walk around, take a train somewhere and just go.  I loved it.  It was fun.  I haven’t really done that since.

There is the social anxiety.  Who the hell is this hobo girl with her big rolling luggage on the beach?  What is she doing here?

But baaahhh.  I climb mountains.  I go to places that are actually physically inhospitable.  Why should I let any possible snide remarks deter me?  It isn’t worth it, so fuck em I say.

The sun is long from setting, but it is great to see it here.  At home it would be starting to crest behind the mountains; one of the misfortunes of living right against a 9000ft mountain; in the morning it is worse as to the east is a 14,000 ft mountain.  This I miss.  In Rhode Island it was the dawn that was most beautiful, but here I can see it being dusk.  Man I miss the ocean.

on Life, Death and Chickens Part I

Earlier this year, my boyfriend and I decided it was time we added chickens to our backyard garden.  We spend the better part of January and February building our A-frame mobile coop which is technically suited for 5 hens.  This was something I was thinking about doing for a long time, for a lot of reasons, and certainly we have already reaped the benefits of more eggs than we know what to do with.

But one major part of this experiment was to settle an ethical dilemma I've had since I accidentally left a worm on a sun-baked stair case and later returned to find it crispy; is it ethical to kill? 

There are meat eaters who abhor seeing a dead animal.  They want to remain unaware of how the slice of steak got on their table.  That is their own journey complete with their own moral reasoning.  For all I know they have already had this internal dialogue with themselves, acknowledged that meat means killing, are okay with that, and simply find a carcass stinky or otherwise simply don't like the aesthetics.  Who can say. 

I am not one of those people though.  I need to make sure I fully comprehend what I am doing when I eat meat, or eat anything, or do anything in general!  I want to make sure that every time I choose to eat meat, I am making a fresh cost benefit analysis, lest my decision making process be abandoned in lieu of rote behavior. 

And this is part of the reason why I wanted to get chickens; to determine if I can physically kill a being for my consumption.  If I can't, I am of the mind that I should probably become a vegetarian again.  I am not a person who is easily disgusted.  I often clean out the coop with my bare hands.  (Don't worry, I wash my hands before eating... sometimes :-P)  If the only thing preventing me from eating meat is that I cannot kill it, then there is no rational reason for me to say that I should eat meat, as the mere act of doing so is what is causing the killing to occur. 

If I have an emotional reaction, sympathy, for example, then why should I not have a similar reaction to the chicken whose fluffy butt has not been running around my yard?  I am doing the chickens no favors by supporting the propagation of large poultry houses.  In addition to being killed they are horribly treated for all of their short lives.  I am favoring the propagation of the Cornish Cross breed, a breed so anthropologically genetically selected that when a backyard chicken enthusiast like myself tries to raise them, they will at minimum get a 30% pre-slaughter mortality.  This is a breed who has been bred to grow so fat so quickly to be made for the pot that they have heart attacks and die before the 6-8 weeks needed to go to slaughter are up. 

A chicken still dies.  I need to make sure my rational, holistic knowledge of that fact is included in the cost benefit analysis, and killing my own meat is the best way to not forget any aspect of that fact.

We are not strangers to death in our flock.  It should be noted that we have had two taken by hawks; one of them was still a chick and had a little chick fluff left.  Then a week ago, one of our hens dropped dead.  We still aren't sure why, but we are suspecting that she was egg bound (where an egg/egg pieces get caught in her reproductive tract and block everything else.)  We weren't forcefully sad about the event.  My boyfriend keeps saying he is disappointed, not sad, that the chicken didn't make it to our dinner table.

But I am not wholly convinced by either of us.  Sometimes we bring it up, saying simply, "poor Not-Penguin". 

That being said, chickens are mean creatures.  Not-penguin, the term we used to differentiate this barred rock who died from the other two, was one of two chicks we purchased after the first hawk victim was taken away.  Because at that time the two of them were still babies while the other four were full fledged pullets (hen form, not laying eggs yet), they were really picked on.  The Penguin  and Not Penguin could be seen running through the yard together, often wing and wing touching.  After Not Penguin collapsed and died, the first chicken trying to peck at it and eat it was The Penguin.  So much for being butt buddies.

Is inter-chicken cruelty a good reason for why it is okay to kill these creatures?  Is the selfishness of the species what makes it okay to take away the one thing all creatures desire to do (survive)?  I am kind of banking on it.  How they view the world is clearly different from how humans view the world.  They are driven by instinct and outside events.  Death is what will happen to them, in any scenario, and they will never be authors of it.  That I have given them a good life while they are here is payment for the fact that I will profit from being that author.

Then again, sometimes I think, if a bunch of teenaged girls were locked in a high school, with ice cream, cheeseburgers and other treats in abundance to eat around them, would it be okay for us to kill them because they keep making fun of the ugly one and all they think about is shoes?

There will be a part II to these ramblings after our first slaughter.

Chapter 8 - Part III

Turning his attention back to the leather-bound dictionary, he browsed through a couple of pages, taking note of a few words.  He flipped to the end of the book, mindlessly reading through the definitions, pronunciations and word usage.  "vru..." he tried, "vru'bech" as he lifted a finger to a nearby shrub and while looking at Onion.  The Nü girl smiled at him and nodded her head.  Plant.  He pointed to the earth beneath him and offered "bech".  She smiled again. Dirt.  Vru'bech; made of much earth; plant.  Similar to a word he already knew: vru'poh; made of many words; book.

What would they call a library? he wondered.  Vru'vru'poh? he chuckled to himself.  He opened the book to the back page, the index to find out, when something on the inside of the back cover caught his eye. It was a quick scribble, a message to Gregor.  Cedric was feeling light-hearted in his linguistic adventures, and the man who asks no questions allowed himself to indulge his curiosity, just this once.

As Onion was putting the finishing touches to her row of the phonetic character "dae", Cedric's sudden tortured cries pierced her concentration and she dropped the quill from her fingertips.  Again, Cedric's eyes scanned the inside back cover, hoping it was only a trick of the mind.

To the only person in the world who doesn't have to spread their legs for my affection,
Keep your wits about you and remember to come home some day.  If I find you've gone over to the natives I'll drag your ass out of there, I don't care what woman's bed I have to pull you from!  Take care of yourself brother.   Rüern keep you pure, but not too pure.

Cedric

Whimpering and at a loss for words, Cedric tumbled to Onion's makeshift campfire study and seized the pen now lying in the dirt.  Before she could react, he dipped the quill in the ink fountain and next to the signature in the dictionary, he began to write out his name.

*Insert picture of signatures here*

The pen was bolder in the former rendition of his name.  Cast in confident strokes, the letters stood out as a signature unbowed.  His current inscription was laid thickly, full of angst and caution.  Every line bore the weight of uncertainty. Nonetheless, there was no mistaking the kinship of those two signatures.

Chapter 8 - Part II

Stubborn he thought, but as a denizen of the once powerful and still proud former Chosen Empire, he was as much captivated by a desire for linguistic autonomy.  In Falloth, the people of the province speak a bastardized version of Yibouhese while their own oral traditions are long since forgotten.  In the few colonies that exist in Benge, coin is exchanged and laws are written in the Empire's words.

But in Eirdred, the City Enforcers were required to use Eirdren. The Lithenese required all texts and official documents to be composed in Lithenese.  Every trade ship out of Sandor bore dual manifests, one in the Empire's word and one in Sandoran.  While now, Yibouh tolerated and begrudgingly respected this, as a young empire they were not so kind.  Everything in the world would turn Yibouhese were it not for the Chosen Emprire, my people.  There is no room for backwater scrawls and runes.

Onion huddled near the firelight, scrawling with a tattered quill on brittle dried parchment Cedric had pawned from the caravan a few days back.  Summer, the time of the minor moon, was in full bloom, but the winds were becoming sharper as they climbed and the air thinned around them.

The main party camped no more than 2000 paces from the Eirdren who followed.  They were close enough that the dull glow of lantern and firelight radiated from the colorful caravan in a soft dome.  Sounds of rowdy diversions echoed in the air and even the wind had the scent of fermented buttermilk and millet wine on its breathe.  Since entering the steppe, trees and brush had begun to thin out, leaving the group out in the open.  Cedric tried to tell himself that any bandits would be drawn to the revelry of the Soa.

He and Vren took quiet solace in the company of the stars.  Cedric had no memory of the night sky outside of Eirdred, and within the city only the brightest stars shone.  But with no sign of civilization for leagues, he was stunned to see the sheer number of gleaming gems that inhabited the beyond.  Stars that made it through to the citizens of Eirdred ruled the skyscape but they were accompanied with a whole host of small red, blue and orange minions in this part of the world.  Perhaps that was what it was like to be a Keeper.

Nights like these Cedric was both anxious and curious to be outside of Eirdred; more the former than the latter.  Yet here, the smells of refuse and sewage did not mix with the aromas of your meals. There was no background music of taunts and and temps of drunkards and whores.  Here in the steppe, a very primal sense of contentment he did not know he had was touched and tickled.

It was a strange sensation to find himself enjoying moments in time, here and there although  he lived an adventure he had never sought nor desired.  Yet here he was, the allure of safety and security gone like a dream.  Why?

"Too many questions." Cedric muttered to himself which caught the attention of the studious Onion.  He waved her back to the work of tracing letters, but managed to have her surrender the dictionary for a while.  Perhaps studying Nüish while the girl carried on could help rid his mind of those buzzing queries.

Cedric's white gloved hand brushed his pale blond shoulder-length hair behind his ear.  He let it hang half loose, as was popular among the many Eirdren.  He was no longer in the kitchen and was playing the role of a wealthy man's son.  It was a refreshing change from the ponytail he usually wore but not so exotic as the fashions of the vast majority of the caravan.  In these lands, men wore their straw-like black hair in rough braids and wax.  Cedric found the Soa hairstyle repulsive and greasy-looking but kept his opinions to himself. 

Chapter 8 - Part I

As the buttes of eastern Eirdred Province grew, so did the stones and cobbles on the road. Onion had become increasingly displeased in her role as sickly leper girl,and her bottom was woefully abused by the road while her sturdy, well-traveled legs went neglected.

The idle boredom did give Vren the opportunity to leaf through the first anthology of paper and ink she ever owned. If nothing else, it was an attractive book, though a little worn from use. Dog-eared pages produced hairline cracks between sheets of paper so thin they otherwise seemed glued together.

Cedric covered a yawn with one hand while the other clung tightly to the wéhkàu leading their cart at the tail end of the caravan.  Onion shifted uncomfortably in her wrappings while sitting in the wagon.   Leprosy, long since cured by the Scholar Emperor Pren during the Age of Medicine, often brought pilgrimages from the outer states of Yibouh to Pho-Boteth for healing.  Few doctors desired to travel outside of civilization to help the barbarians of the empire, though they welcomed the sick without discrimination.

Yet although it was an easy cure, throughout the empire old fears and superstitions seemed to be more contagious than the disease itself.  The two of them remained at the end of the caravan and camped just outside of the main Soa group, with their fanciful and colored covered wagons.  Though the Eirdren who traveled with the Soa formed their own group, their companions did not bother Cedric or Vren.  This was somewhat a boon to the former chef as he was not confident of his ability to repeat his story and Vren was completely useless in that area as well.

The Soa they traveled with were mostly merchants, but a couple of wéhkàu yak breeders joined along to care for the beasts of burden.  Horegrel, the guide and father figure of the main Soa family called himself a gemmer, and had made a small fortune bringing useless colored rocks to rich Eirdren nobility.  He loved the deepness of the Eirdren pockets, and how he could use their shiny metal to acquire furniture, skins and foodstuffs to bring back home.  Regarding the Eirdren themselves, he felt bemused antipathy.  His kindness to the city-dwelling Cedric was simply to spark the amusements of his fellow Soa travelers at the expense of of the former chef.  Of course, Cedric could not understand their japes, but nonetheless, he understood the folly of inciting even stronger passions from his Soa traveling companions.

Cedric had taken notice of Onion's physical molestation of a small brown book, lined with silver in her gauzed hands.

Curious.

She had never once opened it.  She just stared at it, gently cradling it in her hands as if it were a dear treasure, but too afraid to look upon it lest it fly away.

Gregor had been queerly kind to the woman, and while somewhere he could feel in his gut that this was natural of the Bei'thal, his mind nagged at him with sprouts of questions.  True, they were questions that were instinctively crushed underfoot, but lately it was becoming harder and harder to suppress curiosity.

Still, since their incarceration and escape, she had been docile, perhaps even pathetic looking.  A lost sheep with nowhere to go.  Or maybe that was just the gauze.

Extending a pale, reddened hand recently blistered by wéhkàu reigns, he pointed to the Nü's recent leather-bound acquisition and exercised his poor and atrophied language skills.

"Tözjak vru'poh (LINGUISTIC NOTES: töz-give jak-you (implied 'to me') vru-grown from, poh-word, vru'poh = book)" he motioned with his hands and Onion complied by handing over the book to him.  She even seemed relieved to be free of it, strangely enough.

"Gregor's dictionary." he muttered, not entirely sure how he knew.  He quickly flipped through the pages, looking for the words, "Read" "Understand" and "Dictionary" to fashion a sentence to inquire about Onion's level of comprehension of the text.

"Zuo." was the response; no, a word he understood well in Nüish.  He flipped more pages and pointed to a rock. "pai'vik (LINGUISTIC NOTES: pai - part of, vik - mountain, pai'vik = rock)" he ventured in Nüish then followed shortly with the Lithenese, "folth" for boulder.  It was Onion's turn now, and strange as it sounds felt to her lips, she reproduced his word with a level of success she did not realize she was capable of.

"Folth."

Cedric smiled.  He was getting somewhere.

In this way the two passed the time.  The changing landscape from broken plateau to foothills provided more opportunities for the acquisition of nouns and verbs.  At camp, Cedric tried his hand at teaching her the phonetic alphabet of the eastern coast of the empire, codified when Eirdred, Lithen and Sandor were still the Chosen Empire.  Yibouhese glyphs that were used regularly in administration and in the education of the nobility, but were only occasionally peppered in daily correspondence, could come later.

It was a trying task, especially since the Nü refused to learn the phonetic alphabet to write down her own language.  The dictionary, both the Nüish and Lithenese sides had been written entirely in Chosen script.  There existed a script for the tribes of the Outer Crest developed largely by the northern Nü, who had ended their nomadic lifestyles and gravitated towards population centers generations before the southern part of the archipelago.  Few southerners understood this script, but Onion vowed that if she were ever to gain literacy in her native tongue, it would be with that writing style.  She may have begun learning Lithenese to interact on the continent, but she would become literate to one day interact again with her people.

Short story - The Shirt

Coffee still cooling in his hand, he greeted the mid-morning day alone on his porch.  The elevated deck was just high enough that his feet didn't touch the ground when he sat on the floor, but low enough that the chickens were able to nibble at his sandal clad toes, waiting expectantly for some scratch or a piece of fruit.  Those birds were her idea too.

It was dry and the air held vestiges of a cool starry night sky and the sweet aftertaste of desert sage and the caramelized pine needles from yesterday's sun-baked forest floor.  In a few hours the sun will have chased away the last remaining traces of the cool morning but even in this early hour, the clothes he had set on the line were already mostly dry.

They hung silently, wavering occasionally as they saw fit, but he was a man of simple tastes and his clothes refused to make a scene of themselves in front of him.  Plaid cotton long sleeved shirt, red with green and black.  Two pairs of his work pants, Carhartts, one a darker beige, the other a greenish beige pulled the line down with their weight.  Another plaid shirt, this one a simple blue and black.  Five white short sleeved shirts, some splattered with hues of blue and yellow, were the rowdiest of his clothing, letting the wind gusts billow them out like sails when it wished to.

He'd take them all down soon, before he got up and off to work.  But he'd leave the last shirt, the only dancer of the group, as he had left her up day after day.

It wasn't a terribly flamboyant shirt, nothing to radiate and essence of proud, sexual womanhood, but it said everything it needed to say.  A medium brown, sleeveless tank-top, a simple v-neck with the cloth below the V stylistically bunched up and sewn together.  While it wasn't her favorite shirt, he had considered having the morgue lay her out in it.  That was before he saw her, before they advised the closed casket.  She was too badly beat up, they told her.  Showing her to everyone else could only upset them.  He guessed they were less concerned with upsetting her illegitimate husband.

He told them to cremate her in the clothes she had died then, in snow pants so unused she had forgotten to take the tag off, in that drab, deep purple gore-tex jacket she said made her feel like a stuffed animal.  The boots would remain on her precious feet, those boots that cost him more than a few times her beloved embroidered clogs and sandals - boots that he loved in equal measure to her aversion to them.  He was only able to buy them through careful trickery, saying that the boots were for him.  The two shared a shoe-size though, and she hadn't seemed surprised when the boots mysteriously ended up in her closet.

While she never really took to the outdoors like he did, it goes without saying that he loved her.  That is why he shared his life with her.  That is why he got on his knee and proposed to her in that restaurant in Madrid, a year ago.  Even when they returned home and were told they couldn't get legally married, it didn't stop his devotion to her.  Nor did it stop her devotion to him.  She never told him she wanted another man.

He was just a stupid, confused little girl from Idaho when he first met her.  Back then he was perpetually frustrated with himself and he could never figure out why.  He grew up alone, the sole daughter of a ranching family's hard talking son and an evangelical real estate agent, but his emotionally distant father and stifling mother weren't the only sources of his misery.  He was only able to find peace from his discontented mind away from the busy eyes and expectant minds of his rural hometown, climbing the neighboring foothills and mountains. 

But even if it wasn't his parents who made him feel clunky in his skin, even if it wasn't the leers from the high school jocks he started noticing as his breasts filled out and his hips became uncomfortably wide who made him question the purpose of his life, even if it wasn't his fire and brimstone preacher who made him question the existence of god when he told him he would be raped by the demons and devils well after he had bled dry in hell, when he confessed that he felt "tingly" around his fellow cheerleaders, all of those factors did finally push him away for good when he announced to his mother and father that he was a lesbian.  Mere months shy of finishing high school, he was assaulted twice in the street by classmates, threatened, and disowned.

When he moved west, he knew he would never return.  He thought that should have been liberating enough, but his skin still did not fit.  His life still seemed a wasted repetition of going through meaningless motions, without purpose or guidance.

He found a lot of what he never knew he was looking for in her.  She was bold and exciting, fresh and new.  When she looked at him, he knew she didn't see him as man or woman, but as a person, a pure, unique personality built on a set of experiences and motivations. To her, he was divorced from prejudice and assumed predispositions that have been forcibly woven into into the fabric of society since the birth of man. 

It was her who first suggested the surgery, but not before she healed his head.  As they dated, he came to understand himself and the source of his malaise as he readjusted the pre-programed algorithms of his life to match his most earnestly held desires.  She helped him every step of the way with kindness and patience.  While his hips still felt too wide to function properly, his relatively small chest felt superfluous and heavy, she helped him at least escape the scathing judgment of dashed expectations.  In return, he wanted nothing so much as to protect her from every harm in the universe and give her a new world to dance and play. Skin like hers was made for caressing, lips like hers were made for kissing, and eyes like hers were made to draw him into her cocoon of compassion and caring.  He did not fail to oblige her body in every way.

Yet he still held on to his womanhood for the first few years.   They spoke of it together, the transformation, but her responses never satisfied a decision.  More, she worked like a gentle interrogator, drawing out his fears and hopes, little at a time, lest the splinter within his heart shatter and become unrecoverable.

Growing up he never felt particularly masculine or feminine.  He enjoyed playing tag football and playing with dolls, though his dolls were more likely to become explorers and mountaineers than fashionistas.  Initially he was worried that he was making a choice to bury a part of himself to favor another; losing a leg to gain an extra arm.

She had laughed at him for that, as she had often found it easy to laugh at him when he was being unreasonable.  She promised that if he went through the process, she'd be sure to remind him that he still liked to do "sissy things like painting" and that she wouldn't let him turn completely into a "mountain hermit".  She took away the fear that all he would do is add new expectations he never wanted to himself, and made the transformation a question of physical and mental comfort.

After surgery, he knew he made the right decision.  He wouldn't miss out on anything life had to offer.  She would safeguard and remind him not only her own femininity, but his as well, and he promised that he would treasure both his own masculinity and hers.  Well after surgery he was still climbing the Sierras and painting the flowers of her garden, but this time, he felt the present was right, and he could start talking about the future.  That was when he planned the trip to Spain.  That was also when the two started thinking about having a family.

A year ago they were still having these conversations on the other side of his proposal.  Even as she helped him escape the expectations of his community and family, the two of them could not escape the expectations of the state.  Idaho insisted he was female, and California declared that two women could have no legal marital bond.  She was in tears about that, and the only reason he wasn't was that he needed to be strong for her. 

Less than a month ago they had decided together to adopt.  While they prepared the paperwork and looked for candidates, they prepared their home, their hearts and their lives.  She said she wanted to do things she had not ever done, to understand him better and to do it before the responsibilities of the child prevented her from joining him again.  She wanted to be his mountain woman, even if just for a weekend.

Sitting on the porch, his coffee well drained he absently wondered what time it was, though he was sure he was late for work, again.  It didn't matter.  His work was a meaningless pattern of repetitive motions he wasn't willing to sacrifice for.  Not anymore. The rockslide had robbed him of that and the helicopter would never be able to return it to him.  In the garden, the flowers were wilting from neglect, his canvas went unused and the adoption papers had been abandoned. 

He had been in this rut for two weeks, since her death.  He could no more escape his reeling mind than take down that brown shirt from the line.

As the two fastened their seatbelts in the car, just before they left the house together for the last time, she had shrieked.  She had forgotten about the shirt she had handwashed and hung up to dry.  They were running late, he had told her, if they didn't reach the trailhead soon they wouldn't make it to base camp before nightfall.  It would be fine to leave it out a night.  She had relented of course, seeing the impatient excitement of a child on Christmas Eve in him.

Whenever he took his own clothes off the line he would stop now, and touch her shirt.  Two weeks later he could still smell her scent, underneath the soap of the laundering, but every day meant that she was growing weaker.  The smell of sage and pine sought to claim the shirt for their own and there was nothing he could do to stop it.  In a few days she would be completely gone.

He threw his coffee mug at a nearby rock, startling the chickens and they ran away.  As it shattered he put his hands up and started to cry.  He couldn't be strong for her anymore, he failed at that.  He failed at protecting her when she needed it.  He got up and ripped his plaid shirts from the line.  The Carhartts came down as well.  The white shirts he pulled off and ripped them with his bare hands.  Nothing remained on the line except for that brown shirt, dancing in the gusts of wind.

Again he searched for her scent in its folds, weak as it was, and cried into it, feeling as lost as he had when he was a little girl.  She had been everything for him.  His guide, the one who gave him purpose and meaning, while helping him to hold onto the things that mattered most.

Clutching the hem of the shirt, he hesitated, then pressed on the wooden clothespin , releasing the shoulders from the line.  Both shoulders bore an indent where the pins had been but that too would fade in time.  He removed his shirt, his now flat breasts exposed to gentle breeze and hugged the brown shirt one last time.

He put the shirt on, and went inside to grab his paints.

Bioware is a bunch of raaacists

Soooo unlike most of the world, I just started the ME trilogy within the past year.  This means I have not had to wait one second for each subsequent game, or all of the DLC from the first two.  It means, basically, that I have had nearly seemless gameplay.

This also means any problems with character import translations have been that much more annoying to me.  The transition from ME1 to ME2 wasn't terrible.  Yejny Shepard seems to have gotten some rosier lips.  I can deal with that.  Cerberus fucked up and injected red paint or something.  Especially where half of the game I was sporting some intense renegade scars, it even kinda fit in.

Yejny kicking it old school

Yejny well after the peak of her renegade scars, since I had run out of room to renegade grow, while every paragon action made her heal.

Yejny after scar surgery

All in all, not bad I'd say.  She's got mostly a pan-southeast asian look to her (I think).  The bronze skin, asian eyes, high cheekbones and wide-ish head, thin wide lips.  Her nose is not asian of course, but this is the 22nd century, I'm sure she's got some weird European ancestor somewhere there.

So yesterday I finally get to import my ME2 Yejny to ME3.  This is what they gave me:

Bioware says: no pan-southeast asian for you!  You get, what, a black haired irish girl?

Who the fuck is that person Bioware?  I don't know her.  Her lips have all of a sudden become pouty, and how do you translate brown eyes to aquamarine?  What the hell happened to her skin?  She been playing a lot of video games in her mom's basement lately, not seeing the sun?

I did what I could to customize her as much as possible to approximate who she really is.  I'm completely not satisfied with the result:

If this picture were on ME2 Yenjy's passport, she would not be allowed to board a plane.

This is the absolute best I could to and you know what?  it still sucks.  Why?  Two major reasons and a small minor one:

1) skin color
2) eye shape
Minor) lack of prior large forehead

The problem is that the skin color and eye shape options no longer exist.  Bioware helpfully included every possible european white skin tone under the sun, and one, and only one, other skin color that approximates one of those whiteys getting hit in the face with a sack of charcoal ash.  I think that is their version of a black person.  Not sure.

Any Mexicans, Egyptians, Vietnamese, forget about making a character that looks like you.  That was Yejny's skin color, and now it is GONE.  Not to mention anyone from India or Sub-saharan Africa.

Then we have the eyes.  They have a couple of strange diagonal eyes which basically are reminiscent of a Picasso work of art, but otherwise, 100% Caucasian.  They gave Yejny these huge eyes, and really the closest thing I could get was just to make those eyes smaller.  Look at ME1 and ME2 again, those very distinct almost sideways teardrop eyes.  They go from wider to thinner as they approach the outside of the face.  This eye shape was no longer an option in ME3.

What the hell bioware.

The lack of forehead I can only assume was a design change as a whole.  ME1 gave larger foreheads in general.  Not to mention that with each successive ME, Bioware felt Shepard would be using a hair dryer more and more often (I assume) since hair keeps getting puffier and puffier.  I'm not hugely complaining about that, and if that were the only issue, I'd get over it quickly.  Developers have a right to augment style, and lets face it, ME1 Yejny did kinda look like she plastered her hair to her head.

But the lack of options that let you make Shepard anything other than Caucasian is the reason why Bioware is a bunch of racists.