Greetings and Salutations!

Hai. It's my new super-secret blog! This blog is for YOU, my weirdo internet friends. And, y'know, the people I actually know in my real life. I'm starting with the intent to post weekly; if I can manage to be grown-up enough to post once a week and not fail miserably, I'll move on to posting more frequently.

Here's the basics of me, not that you need to know, because you PROBABLY know me:
I have synesthesia.
I claim no gender.

Now, those might seem like strange things to throw out there as the "need to know" part of the CaiMonster. They're both giant parts of who I am, though. You were probably expecting things like "I have two cats" and "I am a blonde, but not a dumb one". While both of those are true, I don't think they define my existence nearly as much.

First, synesthesia.
What colour is the letter Q?
What does red taste like?
Think of your favourite song. What colour is it?
That's synesthesia. I can see and taste sound. Think of it this way. I can hear in THREE DIMENSIONS. It's like I'm a freakin' superhero, except my powers are amazingly lame.
When I think back, I've always been this way. I can't recall the exact point when I started noticing other people weren't the same. I grew up assuming all people could do the exact same things. Now, in my quasi-adult life, I know life is different than what I once believed. I know people with grapheme-colour synesthesia (colours associate with certain things, usually numbers or letters), others with number form (all sequences have colours, such as the alphabet and musical scales), and a couple people who get colours for the things they smell. I've noticed a surprising number of other musicians with sound -> colour, and I believe we were all drawn to it because it's not just music to us. It can be the single most overwhelming thing and the only way we can calm down.
The one moment that stands out in my life was in a seminar I took on music archetypes in film. We watched the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, "To Jupiter and Beyond". Now, if you've watched it, you're familiar with the way it screws around with your head. The next day, we watched it again, with the alternate soundtrack, "Echoes" by Pink Floyd. I sat there, entranced, watching the colours dance across my eyes and the screen, while the words just struck chords within me. When it was time to leave for marching band, I stumbled across campus, shaking and disoriented, still stuck with how the entire thing captured me, stole my mind, played with my thoughts, and left me wanting more.

Onward! To my utter lack of gender identity.
I am biologically female. I identified as a man for a good portion of my not-very-long life, and realised somewhat recently I am not a man. I'm not a woman, either. I've never fit in the cosmic box of crayons. When I was little, I played with G.I. Joes AND Barbies; they were usually having epic battles with the Ninja Turtles. My brother and I would run around, goof off, pretend we were pirates or spacemen, and I genuinely wasn't aware I was different from him until I was in elementary school. It's not fair in a lot of ways. The easiest way I can explain it is that I am a gay man trapped in a woman's body, but even that fails to be accurate. I'm not a man; I'm not a woman. I'm floating off somewhere else, not trapped by the confines of gender.
I had an argument with my soon-to-be mother-in-law over this Canadian family and why it is perfectly acceptable for the parents to refuse to reveal the gender of their children. She insisted that it will cause an identity crisis later in life, and I insisted allowing someone to figure out who they are on their own without forcing society's gender roles onto them is something we should all have. In the end, we both walked away from the argument feeling bitter and angry. I'll probably never have my own children, and while I can't say I would take it to the same extremes as the Canadian couple has if I ever did, I find some degree of comfort knowing other people find gender to be just as confusing as I do.