Complements of the Season. The other kind.

Having disposed, darlings, of the Compliments yesterday, it is high damn time I turned to the Complements. Return with me to the definition, provided by my go-to, slightly-better-than-sketchy online resource, Dictionary.com:

com·ple·ment [kom-pluh-muh nt; kom-pluh-ment] noun

1.     something that completes or makes perfect: A good wine is a complement to a good meal.

2.     the quantity or amount that completes anything: We now have a full complement of packers.

3.     either of two parts or things needed to complete the whole; counterpart.

Today then, I am taking my focus off of the nice things said here and there (i.e. compliments) and turning scattered thoughts to the things that completed 2012 for me, complementary things.

Complete is a relative thing, a vanishing horizon. I stretch for it always, hoping to not snare it fully. Petra much prefers restless to rested, hungry to full, tantalized to satisfied. In review, 2012 did deal up a good measure of complementary stuff, moments, habits, and things that did for moments or do, in the Dr. Evil sense, complete me.

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Writing remains a source of delight for me, and a genuine venue for discovery and expression. I sometimes feel as though I am not creating as spontaneously or creatively as I did when this blog was a toddler back in the day. Many, really most of my gender frontiers and boundaries have been pushed out to their natural and full extent. There are fewer shockingly new things or novel ideas available to me. Less to ponder and fewer words to set to print. This resulted in an all time low of 10 posts for the 2012.

It seems that I am following a common pattern here. Those of us who newly embrace our gender plurality (or whatever variance of special we possess), and have a penchant for blathering on about things in general tend to strip the ground clear down to stubble pretty quickly. Year 3 or 4 in the life of the T-Blogger is typically pretty moribund. Those of you who find a way to post regularly have my admiration and a tiny measure of low grade petty jealousy. Meg and Stana, Lynn and Janie, a tip of the pillbox cap to you.

I do believe though that the written word here on Voyages en Rose for the year is good and complete. Longer form essays taken at a walk with a slower pulse, more mature and settled, less adolescent and breathless. I have written for honesty, and for plain expression as much as I am capable of. In doing so, I am writing in a more convincingly female voice than ever before. Gender Analyzer believes with 81% certainty that the 2012 edition of these Voyages is written by a woman while the 2010 version of me was a relative butch at 71%. Yesterday’s post came in at 84%. This pleases me.

Writing, completes me.

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I write elsewhere too of course. 2012 was a great year for me at Guilty Pleasures. I am the principal editorialist there, responsible for product reviews and the overall style and tone of our surprisingly busy and influential little Lingerie blog. I penned about 20 essays there, mostly reviews of products sent my way by vendors looking for a little publicity. I have become, really quite unexpectedly, a bit of an authority on knickers. I have guest posted on bigger, more influential blogs, and been cross linked, hash tagged, re-tweeted and otherwise digitally cast to the four winds. I am a girl that gets around.

I am assumed to be female by those vendors who seek out my voice and the attention of Guilty Pleasures readers. I do not challenge anyone on the issue. We communicate (for the most part) via email, and it is a correspondence of courtship and intimacy between women. I have found the PR agents, marketing execs and brand leaders who I work with to be super kind, fun and generous women. It is a source of joy for me to share a proposed creative theme, suggestions for product assortments and early drafts with my clients. I get large parcels with handwritten notes of gratitude, smiley faces and fingers crossed in hope that all the pretty things inside fit and feel good. It is business, yes, but it is also girl talk about some of the most completely feminine stuff on the planet, lingerie.

Girl-talk, my dears, very much completes me.

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Getting to know what my tastes run to, what suits me, the criteria that go into evaluating a garment for goodness, greatness or notness has been a real labor of love. It all started by modestly here on Voyages en Rose some years ago with weekly hosiery themed dalliances. Long time readers will recall Petra’s Pantyhose Parade. I fumbled there in the dark to develop a critical eye, an engaging voice and a useful measure of expertise in the hosiery arena. I have since developed what I must immodestly call connoisseurship in a bigger broader field. It has not come easily. It has come in sustained frothy rivers of silk and satin, clasps and cusps. Some of which is pictured above as I take on the annual Re-org of the Drawers Project (yes, we all have our silly year end rituals).

Knowing knickers as I do makes a very real difference in my life. Out en Femme earlier this week, I was able to find a perfect bra / panty set from legendary French brand, Chantelle within minutes of walking into the roughly 4,000 sq ft. of retail space set aside for intimates in Bloomingdale's, needle in a haystack stuff m’dears – go ahead ask your wife if you don’t believe me.

In such settings, I am very much the predator, the accomplished huntress. There were a half dozen brands I knew would be of no interest to me. There were certain boutiques not yet marked down. There were chaotic clearance bins and racks here and there. I ran the calculus, excluded what would not work from view, and isolated something desirable in mere minutes, Terminator like efficiency I thought. I had not worn Chantelle, before, but knew from reputation that their ranges run a little small in the bra band. I did go up size, walked my pretty 70% off retail handful to the service counter and asked the woman there if I had made the right decision in up-sizing.

“Yes, Chantelle does run a little snug, the 36 should be perfect for you. Please try it on to be sure, won’t you?

“Thanks, but not tonight. Too many buttons, too little time you know. I’ll take my chances my dear”

“Just keep the tags on. I’ll staple my card to the receipt, please look me up if things are not perfect."

Things are perfect. 

Perfect Lingerie completes me.

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The same could be said for all aspects of wardrobe. I stopped making fashion mistakes this year. I know which things I own that I will never wear, and have them boxed up for delivery to shelters and services that can use them. I can resist temptation when the item is not ideal. There are no more repeats. Honestly, there are no gaping holes in my wardrobe, and no overarching urges to add. I spy the odd thing here and there, but am not a slave to impulses any more.

Having a great wardrobe, a complete wardrobe, completes me.

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Having a friend to share this with, the ups and downs, the good and bad complements my life too. My partner and the founder of Guilty Pleasures, Ally is a woman. She lives in Europe, and has escaped from a corporate setting to try her hand at a number of entrepreneurial ventures online and otherwise. She communicates with me in one of her many second languages, English with great precision and craft. I cannot remember quite how we connected, but Ally offered me a guest post spot way back in 2010. This lead to a correspondence and in time, a generous and more lasting partnership in the enterprise, my name on the masthead if you will, administrative access to the back end of the WordPress machinery, contact with prospective vendors and etc.

We share notes back and forth about our work, yes, but have learned slowly over time to be friends with one another, to share more generously of our thoughts, and our advice for each other. We speak to each other as sisters. She is my best Girl friend.

Having a Girl friend, being a Girl friend, dear friends, completes me, really completes me.

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I have insights and feelings of connectedness with the 51% of the world that the other 49% cannot hope to have. Perhaps you too, Dear Reader, being who you are, understand that. Having a girl friend, and being a girl friend, well it all comes with fierce responsibilities, loyalties, sensitivities. These things endow the relationship with a wonderful warm patina, a soft finish and feeling absent from our masculine relationships.

I cannot have that relationship with Mrs. Bellejambes. My wife is a marvel of adaptability, she must be, yes? Seventeen years later and us still an item, bless her warm, stout heart. But she signed on for a husband, a friend, a lover, for many things. She did not sign on for a girl friend. I could not ask that of her.

Having a wife who does not understand all of this (any more than I do I suppose) but tries to not stand in the way of the things that make me happy completes me.

Mrs. Bellejambes complements my life like nothing else in the world.

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Having readers to here at Voyages en Rose, knowing that someone will show up here, take the time to read, and even now and then leave a word or two, well that completes me too.

Thank you for helping complement a great year.

I hope your 2013 is rich with complementary moments.

Crossing T’s

Here we are at the start of a lower case “t” transitional week, the strange time betwixt holidays high and a new year nigh.

Christmas was lovely and white here in Dixie, a light blanket of snow lays still on the ground. Enough of the stuff to make a displaced northerner feel nostalgia, but not so much as to make travel a travail or render high heels impractical. For those of you presently ploughed under in the North East, or perhaps recently liberated from a miserable airport in Europe, I hope you are warm at home, or wherever you planned on being.

The big day was quiet and enjoyable Chez Bellejambes, although I must confess that I earned a few Cross Dresser Demerit points with the gift giving. The big hamper of things I picked up for Mrs. B certainly had all the color, cache and cut characteristics desired, but I was positively spastic on sizing. I am a little ashamed, really, someone with my eye and experience should do a little better. We will therefore sally back into the mall melee sometime this week to remedy things. It stings a bit, you know.

General busy-ness with the holidays have kept me away from the blog too, and also from activities that would create compelling new stories to share with you. I did keep a little busy following the ongoing series of guest posts at T-Central featuring the perspective of Cross Dressers and their loved ones. Following my own post, old friends and new names Sally, Aeify, Alice, the indispensable Stana, and most recently from The Wife, of The Cross Dressers Wife fame, all published great efforts. I believe there are another couple of essays yet to come in this series, which I look forward to as much as I enjoyed the warm, welcoming, inclusive and positive tone of the earlier posts.

Going by the comments the essays spawned, it would be fair to say that a few T’s were crossed though. My word, but things got a little heated. If you did not follow along, go spend some time while you have it. Passion is something that is not lacking under our big tent. Strongly held opinions neither. I stayed away from the fracas in part because life is short, but also because of other demands on my time.

Par example, my budding fashion journalistic career. There are a few new posts up at my other home, Guilty Pleasures, which is a lingerie blog for the more mainstream (i.e. non-part time) woman. Recent posts include a brassiere review for newish vendor Top Secret Society, some chit chat about luxury French hosiery brand Gerbe and, most recently, a roundup of Leopard print tights featuring purring entries from Hue and Wolford (ed. amateur model and critic pictured left). I can provide assurances here that none of my academic or vocational advisors ever suggested that I give this line of work a serious look. Well, none of them had my figure either, so there. This work, dear friends, is a blast and a privilege. Perhaps as well, a little cheekily, a little seditiously, these posts auger a day in the future where gender norms and standards of presentation are a little more fluid than they are today.

Other busy-ness comes from clearing the mental deck for a really new and challenging year. It is official that I am going back in to a formal workplace setting after a multi-year, pajama clad consultancy / sabbatical phase early in January. No details here other than to say that the work is something I am genuinely interested in and skilled at, that the work is with people I genuinely like, and that the work is something that I am still young and energetic enough to do well. The office is really close to some terrific shops too.

Part of the mental prep for this new undertaking will include taking stock of yet another year of integrating Petra into the whole me, and vice versa. Much of that work is done via this blog, and so figuring out the extent to which I will be able to do both the blogging and integrating in the upcoming year will occupy much of my thinking this week.

I will have fewer luxuries of time and opportunity in 2011 for the exterior life of Petra. And as much as I have had great good fortune in expanding my range in this past year, the best gains have been in the interior. I understand and love myself better here now than a year or so ago. With that said, I am going to have to be circumspect in my behavior in my newish setting. For example, it will be helpful to periodically stifle the urge to say things like “killer bag, where did you get it?” to smartly turned out clients and colleagues. A fine line exists between personality and liability and it must be walked carefully.

But you know, dear reader, that there is no on/off switch for this stuff, is there? And if there was, I am not sure I would want to fiddle with it all that much. I like the colors, textures and sounds too much. They are integral to me. Subtle adjustments to some of dials can be managed though, and I suppose must be. While I figure out how to tune things for new realities, I do hope you will tune in here time to time to see how it is all going.

I will get a Best of Petra / New Years Frockin’ Eve retrospective of the year posted up before we all turn 2011 later this week. In the meantime, thanks for your shocking, flattering and more welcome than words can render visits here to Voyages en Rose.

Transplant

A mere couple of posts ago I mentioned that the focus of Voyages en Rose would be changing just a tad to better reflect what passes for reality for me. There has been a slightly schizophrenic aspect to content here. I flail wildly between 3 broad themes:

- pensive, sometimes even bordeline trenchant explorations of the inner workings of this Cross Dresser's mind
- reportage on my various Voyages en Femme and general infiltration of a bigger, unsuspecting, sometimes curious and often blithely unaware or unalarmed world, and
- perky, insouciant reviews of lingerie and hosiery that can be found under the tag “Petra’s Pantyhose Parade”.

Three is a crowd as they say. Time for the lingerie to move out of the basement and find a new home.

I started writing about lingerie for a couple of reasons that did not take much thought at the time. Much of it had to do with not really having a clue about what my then recent, open and honest embrace of Cross Dressing would mean to me. I felt that a blog could be a great venue for figuring a lot of things out, but knew that if I did not have an editorial calendar to attend to I might let the effort rust. I knew that I required a structure around which I might better develop a discipline of writing. I therefore committed myself to a weekly product review, and built a complex, multi-variant grading algorithm that would enable me to develop a scientific, stacked ranking of my hosiery stash.

It was a bit of a lark at the time I must confess, but with time it has been a real pleasure, and a minor achievement to develop a body of knowledge and a reasonably well informed voice on these matters. I actually know my stuff, and take pleasure in the connoisseurship.

Today therefore, I am pleased to announce to you, dear friends, that such posts will be found periodically on a much more popular lingerie blog and overall hub for all things under it all, Guilty Pleasures. I have joined a terrific team of lingerie and style enthusiasts as a periodic contributor of views on and reviews of hosiery. My first post there is timed right for the onset of chilly winter temperatures, a comparative review of opaques from Hue and Berkshire.

In my posts for GP I will be assuming the voice of someone who simply knows and loves the subject matter. People visit Guilty Pleasures for lingerie know-how and shopping know-where. Therefore, my gender is a non-factor, and won’t be raised or alluded to there. There is only one Petra Bellejambes though, our internet is rich with bread crumbs, and readers will follow links back here from there, perhaps to be surprised, perhaps not. I hope that my gender will not matter, and the quality of thinking and writing will.

Certainly, it seems that my gender does not matter at all to Ally and Miss Tique at GP with whom I now periodically labor. I take this as a signal of a couple of good things:

First, that the iceberg of hostility that the Trans community needs to navigate around every day is melting, and can only, with time, get smaller, less threatening, drip by sure drip. People with accepting postures and open minds are out there. Clearly, my new friends are such people. Hooray for progress!

Second, this shows that people like me who love to write and are prone to swooning in the face of flattery are easy to motivate. Much in life comes down to time and money. There is no money in this stuff. But if my writing is useful or entertaining to others, I will think it a great use of time.

Team GP is well plugged in to a pretty network of designers, brands and vendors. We get the odd assignment from the network. My first essay for a Guilty Pleasures partner went up last night on Layla L’Obatti’s blog. Layla is a young, talented and determined intimate designer in the early days of the heroic struggle to build a beautiful business, Between the Sheets Lingerie, from scratch. Her stuff is made with love, and made here in America. I would love to see her thrive, and really hope that my Gift Giving Guide there helps shift some gorgeous product.

I’ll keep you all up to date about where and when these posts can be found. I will be back here over the weekend with a signature post on my acute need for a new signature. I found myself cursing my cursive style at a Macy’s counter the other day. This dizzying merry-go-round just never stops it seems.

Before signing off, I want to say a last little something to the amazing women who visit Voyages en Rose. I was not expecting you to gather here in such big, happy and beautiful numbers. Many of you are in the fashion business, or deep in the arts and letters. I would not be striding out in to your world without the superb encouragement you have tendered.

Thank you.

Always happy to see you here, and I hope you will join me in my new venues too.

Petra Guest Blogs, yet again

It is my delight today to center and smooth my skirt before answering the virtual doorbell to welcome visitors from Guilty Pleasures, where I have a guest post up today. Darling, you look smashing, love your bag, please come in.

Regular readers of Voyages en Rose are encouraged to go and visit with Ally and friends over Guilty Pleasures. I wrote a product review on some terrific new tights there, and you might get a laugh out of it. In just under 900 words I was unable to discern whether my new Scrunchy Sheers were made for Supermodels or Streetwalkers. They might be appropriate for solicitors in general, or The Solicitor General. Honestly, I still can’t make my mind up.

In fact, I went so far as to model them in both modes. I do know for certain now that I am not made for the life of the Streetwalker. The gal in the middle (pictured below, please do not click to enlarge) looks pretty much like I like to feel. The more risqué ensembles left and right did feel weirdly empowering for a couple of minutes, but a couple of minutes only. Truly I did not recognize myself. That is not good. Our clothes should reveal the true person within, not distort her. I will think about Halloween though.

So go and read, and then do hurry back would you? While you are away, I am going to have a quiet chat with our newish visitors.

Just now I suspect that you might be surprised to find yourselves reading a Cross Dresser's blog. You probably would have guessed earlier if I had posted a pic on GP, but my real camera is out of town with Mrs. Bellejambes just now and the low-res snaps I did get were just not sharp enough for a real blog. Additionally, it must be said that the model in the snaps over on GP does have nicer legs than me. I am an authority on legs if nothing else.

In any event, welcome to Voyages en Rose. For those of you who have not already hit the back button, I have a thought for you:

You already know a Cross Dresser. It is likely though that you do not know who that person is.

Perhaps a neighbor, a happily married chap like me, whose wife knows and is to one degree or another is supportive. Perhaps somebody who is deeply private in their habits, a little bit guilt ridden and fearful, and is just now wearing a smart pair of tights at the office under his khaki’s two cubes down the way from yours. Perhaps the new woman in Customer Support with the biggish shoulders who, in the not too distant past, had a different name and a different gender assignment, but discovered her true nature through wardrobe experimentation. We are all over the place.

We have wardrobe elements in common, but at some level we are unique as fingerprints or snowflakes. For me, I arrived at this place in my life after long decades of pushing a curiosity away. When I welcomed the curiosity and explored it fully and freely, here is what I found: I am a pretty happy, successful and well adjusted guy, and am good and natural at those guy-ish things. All good, but just not a big enough canvas for me to fully express myself on.

I have always been entranced by and envious of women. Really, you must know you make our heads snap and swivel with your looks. My, but you are beautiful. And your minds, how they confound and delight and sometimes short circuit ours. The company of women is infinitely more interesting and rewarding than the company of men. For me, by presenting as well and fully as I can as a woman, I get as close as I can to experiencing the world through a more feminine set of sensibilities. This is a real privilege. This makes me a happier, better guy.

I have been blogging about becoming that better guy for a couple of years now. If you would like to read a little more about my take on femininity, fashion and foundation garments, I would be happy if you would stay a while and browse here and there. Here are some links to prior posts you might want to follow:

Guilty Pleasures readers being fond of Lingerie, may enjoy this essay: a year end review of a years worth of very rigorous hosiery reviews.

This is a good time of year to remember what a nightmare Black Friday is. Last year I hit the shops and lived to tell the tale here. Take my advice – stay home.

Try this one for a small essay on some of the style icons that caught and held my attention on TV when I just a youngster (hint – there was a Josie and the Pussycats before Rosario Dawson).

Strappy sandals, honesty and openness with a beautiful stranger in the shoe clearance racks. Sounds like a little slice of shopping heaven over here.

Lastly, a small essay on how technology, specifically the internet is helping people like me to find a way to express themselves more openly, with fewer negative repercussions.

And you, dear new friend, can help that happy process along too. In fact, your help is needed.

Cross Dressers, and Transgendered people in general do not have an easy time coming to terms with themselves. But many, and hopefully more each day, do. So if you find someone in your lives struggling with such issues or living out loud with their truths, smile and show some kindness. That will help. And please, by all means, whatever fashion tips you have for us are most sincerely welcomed.

I do hope that the time you have spent here today helps your best, most admired and most envied feminine characteristics surface when that moment arises.

Thanks for visiting.