Moni's Birthday Musings

It's my favorite day on the calendar next to Christmas, Thanksgiving and to opening day of the NFL season.

It's Cuatro de Mayo, aka my birthday that I have been blessed to celebrate for now 54 years and counting.

I thank you for blowing up my Facebook page with birthday greetings from around the world, and I'm not kidding when I say that.  I'm blessed to know people around the world and call them my friends, and that list is expanding as time moves on.

My birthday can be bittersweet at times.   I'm realizing that there are several trans people who have been murdered this year that will never know what it is like to live 50+ years on this planet, and we just got word we lost another young Black trans sister in Wichita, KS just 48 hours ago.  .We have been robbed of their talents and potential contribution to building our community and society at large.

And I'm tired of that crap.  I'm also seeing with increasing frequency the artists that provided the musical soundtrack to different points of my life are leaving us, as Prince's untimely death drove home two weeks ago.

And as the just concluded BTAC pointed out, I am now a seasoned elder in the community and not a neophyte thirtysomething activist in awe of my elders I'm encountering in a large convention shared space.  Now it's me that frequently has the experience of awestruck trans people approaching her.

Hey people, I'm human.  The only people whose heads I bite off are people who wish to oppress us.

But I'm blessed to be a year older, celebrating 22 years being my authentic self, and still don't know what I'm going to do to celebrate it.   It is Cheap Chicken Day at Frenchy's, so I'll probably be destroying some of that later.

Will be nice to see how this day plays out...