I always thought it was cooler being female than male because society allowed you more leeway to cross gender stereotype lines, so you could be a chick and have/do it all.

I was really young.

But when my cousin went FTM my first reaction was "Why?" Quickly followed by "Because he had to." I don't need to understand.

Spa day in a canine hyperbaric oxygen chamber

Ruby looks nervous. She sits upright on her bunny-like haunches, her fuzzy red ears point straight up in the air; her round black eyes stare straight at mine. The man in the black suit is cranking the dial on the adjacent control panel. 0.3...0.4... the numbers climb by the seconds as the atmospheric pressure inside the glass cylinder rises. The man tells me the optimal pressure for dogs is 1.2 atm, roughly what Ruby would have experienced as a fetus inside her mom's belly.

We're at Wag Style, a doggie day spa on the side street of a trendy Tokyo neighborhood. I've brought Ruby here to test out a canine hyperbaric oxygen chamber that I once blogged about. The technology is the same as that rumored to be used by athletes ranging from Lance Armstrong to Michael Vick — it sends concentrated amounts of oxygen to problem areas in higher atmospheric pressure, supposedly expediting the recovery process.

But when my cousin went FTM my first reaction was "Why?" Quickly followed by "Because he had to." I don't need to understand.

Totes.

Hubby tells stores about being 16 and hieing himself off on a tall ship to the South Pacific (really, it was some kind of cruise ship, and they wanted crew, and he wasn't in school, and his folks said Yes) and I'm always struck by the difference about being a boy of 16 wanting to have an adventure and a girl of 16 wanting to have an adventure.

Sometimes I think it'd be really cool if I'd been born a woman. Other times I think I'd have ended up very angry and would have gone through a lesbian separatist phase.

It still amazes me to this day that at 16 I found myself in the south of France renting my own hotel room.

Hee. Go Jesse with bringing up phrases I usually use like "performing female"!

Hubby tells stores about being 16 and hieing himself off on a tall ship to the South Pacific

Connie, your hubby is Adventure Man! I mean, he may be currently retired from active, vigorous adventuring, but he must have enough stories for 2 lifetimes.

Hah. Meara, when I just skimmed through the conversation, I figured you were involved somehow.

I hate that flag.

Ha! I'll pass it on. I think that the guy just flies it because he wants to be "subversive in suburbia."