29 August 2009

More steamroller days

Back in 2007, I blogged about steamroller days - days where you feel like you've been run over by a steamroller.

Well I've had a lot of them recently. Here's a typical work day from this week just gone:
* up before 8am;
* first customer waiting when I get to the office at 8:45am;
* work the morning, which runs over to about 12:40pm;
* prepare lunch in about 5 minutes, but have to leave it because...
* 1pm customer arrives at 12:45pm;
* eat lunch at 2pm while organising to go out for customers I have to visit;
* drive to 2 customers and the bank then back to office;
* 5pm to 6pm - spend an hour on the phone helping someone with a technical problem;
* get about half an hour of paperwork done before organising my family and travelling to visit relatives for dinner;
* get home around 9pm, go back to the office and work on paperwork until midnight;
* get to bed at 2am.

Yes, I manage to squeeze the occasional few minutes online amongst all of that, but it's why I haven't managed to go out shopping en femme since Easter, and why I don't always manage to get to the weekly cafe nights. Some people even think that I'm snubbing them by not travelling to Sydney (at least 2 hours drive each way) for events!

To top it all off, I've got a persistent sore throat which makes a feminine voice all but impossible and my weight is going up because I don't have time to exercise.

01 August 2009

Crossdressing and politics

I've been thinking about this for a few years now.

Is Australia ready for a crossdressing politician? I don't mean someone who is in the closet about their crossdressing. I mean a heterosexual, married man who publicly admits that he is a crossdresser, complete with a sizable collection of publicly accessible photos on flickr in various places online. [edited October 2010 - flickr photos no longer publicly accessible but there are photos online elsewhere.]

A few years ago, I seriously considered being involved in politics but wasn't going to be out about my crossdressing if I did. Not long before my candidacy would have become public, a TS friend made a comment to me in a chat room. Her comment was something like "It's not if you get outed, it's when. If you go into politics, you will be outed." I knew that what she was telling me was true, and that I'd been trying to delude myself into believing otherwise. I had also gained a fairly good insight into how dirty politics really is, so I withdrew and that was that.

After a while, I had a bit of a think about all of that, and decided that if I ever do get into politics, I will have to be completely out about my crossdressing before I even start.The reality is that I've been letting people around me know about it, but telling the world at large is something else entirely. I'm not sure whether I'm ready for it, and I'm not sure that I want to do that to my wife and son.

Then there are the politicial ramifications. If I'm completely open about my crossdressing, will a political party want anything to do with me, and would anyone vote for me? Imagine for a moment that there was an election where the 2 leading candidates were a married crossdresser and a guy who had abandoned his wife and children to shack up with his secretary. Which one would people vote for?

The only political positive would be that there'd be no skeletons in my closet. :)