Stochastic Musings – Headbands, Headaches, Heartaches, Hearty Meals, Naked Me, Naked Men

What has Miss Kalina Isato been up to during the past month? Looking fabulous, taking some photos and playing with her hair. She tells us all about that and also talks about hair fashions (Headbands! Headbands!), cheap men (Come on, buy a girl a drink!), having pneumonia, pasta bowls (fettucini to die for, darling), and a whole lot more. Don’t miss a minute of this month’s Stochastic Musings.

A number of transsexuals wear headbands as a functional fashion accessory. If you have long straight hair and it just flops forward a lot because your bangs are too long, a headband can be your best friend. Unfortunately, headbands don’t look good on everyone. Some of our less fortunate sisters who don’t have their own hair wear wigs and think it looks cute to wear headbands with them. What some girls don’t realize is that you just can’t “slice” your wig with a headband and expect it to look good. The headband is supposed to pull hair back or keep it out of the way. In fact, its most functional use is to pull back bangs or side hair. I can’t blame these girls for not knowing because many of them don’t have a lot of experience dealing with real hair. A headband is supposed to rest somewhere between your natural hairline and right in front of the natural circumference of your head. It can be used to delineate between two differently styled halves of hair on a head. The front part could be tousled or wavy and the back part could be straight, or vice versa.

When you go to enough bars, you get to meet all kinds of weird people, including recently paroled prison inmates. They try their come-on lines with me, always with no success because these cheap idiots can’t afford to buy me a drink. “Do you wanna’ git wit’ me?” they’d say. Do I look like I have the word STUPID written across my forehead? Because if I had to end up supporting one of these uneducated losers, I’d surely want to have the option of picking and choosing the best of them. There are trannies, and genetic girls, who for some reason or another end up hooking up with prison inmates who all claim to be innocent. Who needs the headache of being with an inmate when there are plenty of honest Joes in the world and I can pick and choose among them?

Pneumonia really takes its toll on the body. I started with what I thought was the flu back on September 3 and a week later it was diagnosed to be pneumonia. Antibiotics helped with the chills and fever, but whatever “bug” it is is still in my body and still affecting me today. Coughing hurts my right chest wall in a severe way now, probably because I strained some muscles there. The strange thing is it’s only on one side of my chest. If it were on my left side, I’d call it a heartache, but it’s on the right side, so what do you call that? Hmmm…

Tavern on Camac has been hosting my Monday Night Tgirls party for the past three years. Besides being voted Best Bar in the city by Philadelphia Gay News, many people don’t realize that it’s now home to some of the best food in the area. Chef Eric Paraskeva, former chef of Slate and Lolita, has created a fantastic menu offering such culinary delights as braised lamb shank, pan seared scallops, homemade fettucini with lamb, and pan seared pork chop. Tavern on Camac’s new restaurant is named Terra. It’s an intimate 34-seat space that’s very nice, cozy, and not pretentious. Do try the homemade fettucini with lamb. It’s awesome!

Some of you might know that Robert Mapplethorpe is one of the great photographers of our time and known for his black and white work of flowers, famous people, and naked men. The naked men portraits were the most visually stunning and caused the most controversy, eliciting homophobic remarks from feeble-minded idiots. Some of you might know that I’m a budding young (or old, depending on how you look at it) photographer as well and that I did delve into nude photography in my past, too, particularly with myself as the subject. It was with great delight when I saw The Body and Photography being offered in this semester’s course catalog at my art school. Previously, the course was called Nude Photography, but the title was changed to appease university officials. I enrolled the day this graduate school class was announced. I think I was the first student. Our first assignment was to produce a substantial body of work on our own body. I could’ve cheated and used any of the over 100,000 photos of me in the archives, but I wanted to produce a new body of work, something that I would be proud of, so I set out to create my own version of the famous (or infamous) statue called Hermaphrodite Sleeping. My assistant captured many images of me as the sleeping hermaphrodite Everyone in class loved my images. I also did some kitschy images of me as a witch and a nun. Not for the faint of heart. And, yes, I’m not fully clothed. If you have an open mind, you can search my gallery web site for these images.

On Friday, October 9, I went to the AxD Gallery with my friends, Peter and Kristin, to see Vivienne Maricevic’s “Shooting Men” gallery that featured gay men, transvestites, male-to-female transsexuals, and female-to-male transsexuals. Vivienne is quite possibly the first photographer to ever capture images of female-to-male transsexuals. I described her work as “very provocative.” She thanked me and admitted that she wants to continue her work photographing transsexuals, but the problem nowadays is “every transsexual wants money to be photographed,” she said. I told her that my friends and I are not like our greedy fuck-for-money transsisters. We’d be willing to be photographed for free. You have to be a total retard to refuse to be photographed by a famous photographer! I agreed to help Vivienne gather enough models so that someday in the future she’ll come down to Philly again to take pictures of us and then – who knows? – we might be famous in a book or gallery like the lovely transsexuals she had on the walls of the AxD Gallery. My friend, Kei, is one of the curators of the gallery. The last time we met we were goth-glam fetish queens. “You were rocking the low-key-casual-cute look last night. Quite impressive,” she said the next day. Realness, baby!

My book, Passable, is now finished. The book is an epic 210 pages and is an ambitious work meant to help transgender girls learn about and develop one of the keys to their success in their transgender lives. I draw from many, many examples in my life and others, go into various do’s and don’t’s, citing specific examples, and help girls understand that passability requires more than just having confidence. There are so many crossdressers and transsexuals who can benefit from this book. Order your copy by clicking here. One thing many of you may not realize is there are gender therapists using my previous books for their research!

Are you ready to learn the secrets to becoming super glamorous and super passable? Just order copies of my videos, Secrets to an Awesome Makeover, Natural Makeup Techniques, and Totally Natural available here.

Category: All TGForum Posts, Transgender Fun & Entertainment, Transgender Opinion