Siri, Alexa, and Cortana Are On To Me!

I have separate male and female online accounts for things like Google and various social media.  Ten years ago, this arrangement worked well.  Kelli could shop online for clothes, do a little blogging, and read e-mail addressed specifically to her, then log off and let my male side do the same.  No unauthorized persons or entities knew that Kelli had a male side and vice versa.  Everybody was happy and peace reigned in the enchanted kingdom.

Then, social media started getting nosey.  Since more and more of our lives was being recorded online, it was easier for social media to begin forming databases of who we were and what we were doing.  Social media began suggesting that we contact "these folks" who shared common interests, or did we know about these distant relatives that we had never met, or did you know that you live five minutes away from a White Castle?  At this moment in time, social media probably knows as much about Kelli as it does my male side.

Since I am one and the same person, there is online overlap between my male and female sides.  An example of this would be online friends both Kelli and my male side follow and communicate with.  Both sides also have people that communicate exclusively with either the male or female side.  This includes businesses as well.

So a year or so ago I was shocked when my male side received a friend suggestion from Google + that I should be friends with Kelli.  I later laughed and joked that it was because we lived in the same neighborhood.  Still, what I didn't realize was that it was a case of social media (even Google +) getting smarter and more curious about each of us.

Now most all of us with a smart phone are also living with a Siri, Alexa, or Cortana, and these gals are now freaking me out.  I will verbally mention that I am interested in something while talking to a friend, and the next time I go online I'll see advertisements for that very item.  Has my smart phone been listening to me?

The latest incident spooked me pretty good, although most folks wouldn't give it a second thought.  (I do get a little paranoid every now and then.)  Last Christmas I bought my first Barbie doll.  I had always lamented the fact that as a boy I wasn't allowed to play with them, and now that I am an adult I can do so without getting into trouble.  And this Barbie is perfect for me.  She is a musician Barbie, came with her own guitar and electric piano, and is dressed in a style that would suit me perfectly -- grey knit short-sleeved top and blue white print skirt to just above the knees with tennis shoes.  I fell in love with her and currently have her on my desk watching my computer screen.

A couple times since I have anonymously been on big store websites and glanced through a few Barbie accessories just to see if something caught my eye, but that was my only activity online.  I mentioned Barbie a few times at home in the company of my smart phone, but didn't think anything about it.  Then last night, I logged into YouTube as Kelli.  Suggested videos popped onto the screen that included lots of Barbie videos.  Why did this happen?  I never knew there were Barbie videos!  I'm not really interested in Barbie videos!  How did YouTube generate this suggestion?

Just wait.  Before long, I'll be online as Kelli and Alexa will remind me I need more shaving creme, or my male side will be on social media which will remind me that Kelli's birthday is next week and I should buy her some lingerie.  I hate to stereotype, but these gals just can't keep a secret!

Kelli

Happy 2017!!!

Happy New Year everyone.  I hope the new year is everything good you hope and pray for.

I will be returning to my blogs this year.  I really can't believe it has been almost three years since I did a full post on this blog.  Anything exciting happen TG-wise in the past three years?

Kelli

COMING SOON: Kelli 2.0

My blog lives!  Please pardon moi while I prepare to return with my random thoughts.


Kelli

Please Stop Trying to Read My Mind!

I'm being serious on this subject.  There are people trying to read other people's minds, and I wish they would stop.  It serves no useful purpose and is very annoying to us whose minds are being probed.

Recently, a college football player announced he was gay and was planning to be drafted into the NFL as the first openly gay football player.  Sorry for the lack of specific facts.  I don't follow professional football like I did in the past.  If the story had been about a cheerleader who came out as gay, I probably would have paid more attention to the story  (CAUTION:  Please keep your mind out of the gutter.  I'm just more interested in cheerleaders than football players.  Wait, that didn't help.  Nevermind!).

So I've heard various opinions expressed on this.  Some people think it is great.  Some people are indifferent (like me).  Some people have concerns on the matter and have brought up the old "What is he thinking?" question.  I'm sure you know what I'm talking about.  A straight football player in the locker room sees a gay football player look at him and, in a fit of paranoia, decides the gay football player is leering at him and is disgusted at the thought of a man finding him attractive.  Paranoia is bad.  Absurd paranoia is absurdly bad.  People!  Chill!  Knowing with 100% accuracy the thoughts of another person is impossible without that person actually stating what he is thinking.

Years ago, while in a serious relationship with a young woman, I decided I needed help dealing with my gender issues and went to a friend who happened to be a psychiatrist.  Back in the day, I was worried if I was a transvestite or transexual.  After several visits, the doctor told me that was not the question.  He said my problem was depression (which I knew I had and had refused to seek treatment for) and we needed to deal with that first.

I told my girlfriend I was seeing a therapist, but outside of that I didn't tell her much.  I didn't give her weekly reviews of what we discussed or what I was thinking.  It never occurred to me that she might want this.  One day we got into an argument and she yelled "Well, that doctor is helping you to become a woman anyway, so I guess I don't have much room in this relationship!"  I was stunned and tried to assure her that was not happening.  I found myself wanting the doctor to cure me of gender issues, the doctor wanted to cure me of depression, and my girlfriend was convinced the doctor was about to prescribe hormones and a sex change for me.  Why was she so certain of all this?  She had apparently read my mind, which is impossible and absurd.  You can't win against impossible and absurd arguments.

The Good Book says we are to bear "good fruit" and we are to know others by the fruit they bear.  This refers to the works we do in this life.  A good person should be bearing good fruit, or doing good deeds.  An evil person will bear bad or rotten fruit -- evil deeds.  If a person has never done evil to me, why should I consider that person evil?  If I know for certain of no evil deeds done by this person to others, why should I consider that person evil?  The same works in reverse.  If a person does me evil, I should not be expecting good from this person.

By the way, Paul wrote to the church at Corinth that we are to basically give each other the benefit of a doubt too.  To misinterpret a person's actions and accuse them of evil when the actions had a good intention is bad too.

Stop trying to read people's minds.  You'll save yourself some grief and paranoia.  Now if only I could convince the NSA of this.

Kelli

Keeping Up To Date With The Internet

Once when I was a kid, back in the early seventies, our television broke.  The repairman diagnosed the problem as a burned-out picture tube and said it would take a week to get a new one.  As a kid, you would think an Old Testament prophet had proclaimed a famine in the land by our response.  No television for a week!  What would we do?  We'll perish without television!

Then Dad assured us everything would be alright because we still had radio.  I looked quizzically at Dad and said that was fine for music, but radio didn't have any shows (comedies or dramas).  Dad stuck to his guns, and totally failed at proving his point.  Radio comedies and dramas pretty much disappeared from the airwaves by 1960 in the U.S.  Dad hadn't realized this and seemed very out-of-date to us kids.  Ironically, as I write this, I realize that to people born after 2000, terms like "picture tube" and "tv repairman" seem quaint and archaic.  I reassure myself that it has probably been 35 years since I last used these terms, so I feel more current with the times.

One of the fun things about crossdressing is keeping up to date.  Makeup is always changing.  Makeup essentials -- mascara, blush, eye shadow, powder -- seem fairly constant from decade to decade, yet the application of these elements on the human face along with seasonal changes in color, changes season to season even from morning to night.

Fashion changes!  I would love to dress like women from the sixties or seventies, but came to the realization that I would look like I just walked off the set of Here's Lucy or Laugh In.  Hot pants cause a girl to stand out, no matter the size of the crowd.
 
I've discovered the hard way that the internet also changes.  I had an old desktop computer that served me faithfully for about six years until the hard drive crashed.  Over the years, my browser had amassed a large collection of TG bookmarks.  One day, I noticed that I had dozens of bookmarks, but only had a half dozen sites that I regularly read and that were actually beneficial.  I decided to weed the bookmarks and began visiting the old sites.

Now the oldest of these bookmarks were five years old.  To my surprise, the majority of these bookmarks were now useless because the sites and blogs they led to were now gone.  My favorite blogging site now had competition like Pinterest and Tumblr, which had not existed five years earlier.  That was a pretty fast change in the internet (to me, anyway), and I had been caught snoozing.  Actually, the big migration to Pinterest and Tumblr would have occurred in a matter of weeks or months, but discovering this years after the fact just shocked me even more.

Since purging my computer of porn, I'm hoping to spend more time on many other things, including my little blog, and I hope to update the "Blogs I Follow" gadget in the sidebar.  I follow some very popular and beneficial blogs that I should share with others.  There's plenty of porn on the internet that is easy to find.  There's not enough good character -building sites on the internet, and if these sites also improve our fashion sense, so much the better.

Kelli

Purging the Internet

In my last post I referenced the fact that I had greatly refined and reduced my time spent surfing the internet.  After following this new practice for about a month, I have to admit I'm a bit surprised at the results.  I'm extremely happy with the newly freed hours in my life that have been claimed by more important and fruitful pursuits, yet I feel like I have a bit of a hangover from drinking in too much of what the internet offers.  This is probably due to the addictive nature of my problem, and I'm confident it will decrease in intensity as I do my best to temper my online activities.

One of the first things I did when attacking this problem was deciding to rid myself of all "porn".  I've placed the word "porn" in quotations for the moment only because I feel the need to qualify.  Porn is bad, no matter what.  I consider myself a good Christian girl from the midwest, so having to deal with this issue is doubly shameful to me.  But, I think I got pulled into some porn because I don't view porn like non-transgendered men.

It is a rite of young manhood that you will be exposed to porn.  I found myself in such situations when I was young.  However, in my case, it didn't matter if it was magazines or videos, I was never interested in any sort of porn, straight, gay, or fetish.  I attribute part of this to my Christian upbringing, and part to just confusion in my mind as I found myself fantasizing about being a woman and couldn't figure out where that placed me in the straight-gay-fetish timeline.

When the internet came along, a whole new world opened up to the transgender community.  Tons of beneficial information and resources suddenly became available worldwide, and along with all this information came tons of bad things like porn.  The porn industry has its tentacles firmly entrenched in the internet and does its best to infiltrate and pervert those areas of the internet that shun pornography.  If you don't believe me, try doing an internet search for something completely innocent, such as searching for a favorite children's cartoon character, and see how far you have to go in the search results before you start coming across XXX sites.

My progression in internet surfing went like this:  started with bona fide and legitimate TG websites, followed by websites featuring TG artwork, followed by TG caption and fiction websites, followed by websites featuring nicely and appropriately attired cross dressers, followed by racy and adult TG artwork, and capped with websites featuring cross dressers who "let it all hang out".

One day I took a step back and noticed that last group of websites -- letting it all hang out.  On one hand, I enjoyed how feminine some of these cross dressers looked.  On the other hand, they completely ruined their feminine appearance by proclaiming their masculinity.  It was then that I noticed I was on a slippery slope and didn't like where I was heading.  Something that appears both good and bad will ultimately just be bad for you in the long run.

I enjoy pictures of feminine cross dressers.  I admire the work they put into looking like a woman.  I admire their taste in clothes.  I admire that they were brave enough to take that photo of themselves in the middle of Disneyland, or some such public place.  Nothing wrong with that.  The "let it all hang out" pictures proclaimed a pornographic aspect that I had never wanted in my life, but had sneaked in through an open window.  I had to close that window, sweep out the house, and reclaim my home.

If Kelli Land was an actual place, I would want it to be a place the whole family could come with no fear that anything inappropriate would be within reach of anyone -- young or old, male or female.  I don't want Kelli Land to be a glorified adult book store.  I'm better than that, and by getting rid of the bad in my life, I've got more time for the good which will prove that I'm better.

Kelli

Purging!

Sorry for not writing lately.  I hope and pray that will be changing a bit.

Most all of us have heard of purging, and quite a few of us have done it from time to time.  Purging, for the gender-flexible, usually involves ridding our alter ego's of their clothes, books, belongings, etc.  I've purged myself of Kelli's things many times over the decades... I mean... years (I can't be THAT old).  The reasons have ranged from trying to rid myself of all things feminine in my life to living situations that were less than private to having nosy girlfriends.

For the benefit of younger readers, let me just caution you that purging never improved my condition.  Even experts will tell you that your transgenderism, crossdressing, transvestism, transexualism, crossdreaming, gender dysphoria, eonism, whatever the heck you want to call it, etc., will probably not be cured (go away) by purging.  Your best course of action is learning to live with it and turning it into something more positive.  The only happiness my purging brought about took place in the lives of the ladies who frequented the local thrift stores in my neighborhood.

However, I just purged myself of something that I think will be positive.  I just purged myself of the internet (at least a big portion of it).  Best I can tell, I think I was addicted to the internet.  I could spend hours every day looking at transgender pictures and artwork, saving favorite TG captions to my hard drive, reading the latest TG fiction, etc.  I would surf the web every morning up to time to leave for work.  After work, the first thing I would do upon arriving home would be to prop up my heels, check my e-mail and start surfing again for a couple more hours.  Time for bed?  Not before I check the e-mail and Twitter again followed by more surfing.

For some time I felt that this was some sort of compulsive behaviour, but I couldn't see any negative effects.  It wasn't until I could no longer deny the fact that I was ignoring other things in my life because I was surfing the internet that I decided something had to change.  I finally decided one night a few weeks ago that I was no longer going to surf the internet, resolved that the next day I would commit myself to this change, and went to bed.

Then, things took a strange turn.  I got up that morning to check my e-mails before going to work and found my hard drive had been erased.  Everything was gone!  I was shocked.  Nothing like this had ever happened to me before.  Then I was very annoyed and a bit angry.  True, I had promised that I would no longer surf the internet, but in this day and age I rely very heavily on e-mail and Twitter.  I needed a computer for work and personal use.  It looked like I was going to be buying a new computer, which I did not look forward to doing.

Later that day, I was looking for some important personal papers.  My important paper filing system is very simple, but not very efficient.  I take a large box and label it "IMPORTANT PAPERS 201X", and all the important papers I get that year go in that box.  It works unless I can't remember the year.  So I'm looking in a box of important papers and find... the recovery discs for my computer.  What they were doing in a box of important papers, I'll never know.  I slapped the discs into the DVD drive and within an hour had a bare-bones computer running once again.  I was thrilled and started checking my e-mail.

Looking back on this, I can't help but feel a higher power was giving me a little help in my purging.  By ridding my computer of the browser, all my bookmarks, and any files that could easily be used to recreated a papertrail, I got a fresh start that I had never considered.  Having my computer wiped of its information has been a terrific blessing.

So now, I spend 2-3 hours a day at home and work on e-mail and Twitter, but that's pretty much all.  I have a few (less than six) blogs that I like to check everyday, but none with TG pictures/artwork or such.  In other words, they are pretty much "G" rated, or as innocent as TG subjects can be presented.  The hours that have been reclaimed for personal living are spent with my music, going outside, more personal interaction, and resuming work on a college degree.

Now if you're wondering if I've been tempted to return to my old ways, the answers is "Good heaven's yes!"  I guess it was the first night after I had rebuilt the hard drive on my computer, I was tempted to mindlessly surf the web.  As a Christian, I had to chuckle at myself.  Does the devil really think I'm that big of a pushover???

Kelli