last night i dreamt this elaborate dream. it started out with me fleeing to brazil with my family, for reasons i can't remember, & traveling in unlikely ways - in bare feet through the tropical foliage between houses, climbing under concrete bridges & through sewer pipes, trying to avoid poisonous plants & animals despite my complete ignorance of which ones were dangerous. this part of the dream ended when my family (not my actual family, but my family in the dream) and i started hiding in the corners of a huge house that belonged to a rich family, narrowly avoiding being seen over and over until finally one day they spotted us. they took up our cause (we had left our home country for political reasons), hosting us & holding fundraisers for us...


and then in the next part of the dream i was going to visit an apartment that i used to live in (in this city in brazil, and yes i know that doesn't make sense), and in which i had left an important book. the apartment was in two parts, an upstairs and a downstairs, separated by an outdoor staircase, so i could have just gone upstairs to get the book, but i stopped at the downstairs doorway for a moment to check in with the current occupant as to whether it was ok. they (i don't remember the person's gender, or whether it was relevant) ignored me for a good ten minutes, so i figured i would just go get my book...and ended up reading their journal, which was in a book marked 'instructions' right next to the book i'd come to get. then i went on their computer and saw that they'd found a letter of intent that i'd written and posted it on the internet.

after a long while in the dream i went back downstairs, and told the occupant that i'd gone up to get a book: they followed me outside their doorway and asked me if i was one of the political refugees (not their exact words) staying with that rich family. i asked them how they knew, and they wondered how 'could someone as obviously foreign as [i am], and someone so obviously fully transitioned, think [i] was incognito.' this threw me for a bit of a loop, since in the dream my body & gender presentation were the same as they are now, and i wondered for a while at the extreme presumption, and then wondered which way they were reading me as having transitioned. my dream logic went something like: huh. if they think i'm a 'fully transitioned' (whatever that means) ftm, then that's a bit odd because i definitely don't usually pass for a guy. and i guess they could be reading me as an mtf dyke, but would an mtf dyke wear a binder? and then i figured that people do indeed figure out their bodies & their genders in a multiplicity of ways and an mtf dyke might indeed bind, and that ultimately it didn't matter, but what an interesting assumption this person was making about my body.

and then they told me they would see me later that night at the film screening at my hosts' home.

and then i woke up, with back pain & a sore throat, & bright green leaves in my head.


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last night j shot t & i for that photo project, and it was fun and amazing. putting on my suit is obviously always fun, because it makes me feel extremely fancy for a change (in my usual life i'm habitually out-fancied by a lot of the people around me, & often i wish my clothes were fancier not in a money way, just in a better-put-together way). i don't know what it is with girl drag, but it's also fun in a weird way: putting back on for pleasure or art this gender that i felt so weird in.