1. Zac Oh, wait. I think they mean literally. Bananas
2. Oranges
3. Yuzu
4. Blackberries
5. Strawberries
“Fruit of the Loon.” I’m bipolar. It’s funny.
I wanted to get the prompt out of the way, but I’m sure I’ll have more to say later. This is just one of the prompts I didn’t do last year. It’s so interesting that I can’t *believe* I spaced this one. 🙄
It’s time to go make some Ethiopian coffee.
Oh, and I forgot an important detail in the piece yesterday. Said cute black guy in his 20s actually worked there. The story makes a LOT more sense when you know that.
The title comes from a conversation I had on Threads yesterday. Starbucks was talking about their hot tea. I replied, “as good as the hot tea is, the green iced tea is insane. Good on you.” I got a like from Starbucks and said, “now that I’ve got your attention, could I sweet talk you into offering a Moroccan mint iced tea as well?” They did not reply to that, so I am guessing the answer is “no.” I tried, people. I tried for all of us.
I think I’m just going to talk about funny conversations that have happened with me recently, because I don’t have a writing prompt to jog old memories.
The first is that I go to bed earlier than Zac, and he always says goodnight to me when he’s going to bed, so I wake up with messages and cute memes. This morning, it was this gem:
“Dr Pepper is BBQ Sprite.”
It reminds me of grilling out in the backyard with Dana, because the first time we grilled for my dad, I made a Dr Pepper BBQ sauce.
My friend Tiina posts these really funny memes about Finland and as I told her, “every time I see a fact about Finland, I learn that I don’t have much Finnish blood (according to Lindsay’s DNA results, 3%), but I do have a Finnish personality. This week, it has been learning that it’s “comma fucker” in Suomi and not “grammar Nazi.”
I was walking around Trader Joe’s looking for some lunch and realized I needed some coffee. I walk up to this cute black guy who was probably in his early 20s. He has a thick African accent (not sure which country), and I ask him what the best coffee is. He picks the Ethiopian and I say, “is that because you’re from Ethiopia?,” laughing. He looked sheepish even though I was only teasing him, so I said that my grandfather’s favorite was Ethiopian and I already knew I liked it.
My grandfather’s favorite coffee was Kenya AA. I didn’t lie to the kid. I remembered that when I was writing down the story. I feel bad that I told an Ethiopian kid my grandfather’s favorite coffee was Ethiopian when it just came from Africa somewhere…. 🙄 My brain just got scrambled in trying to keep this kid’s feelings from being really hurt…. that a genuine lighthearted teasing moment wouldn’t become a dart of some kind. I bought exactly what the kid recommended and now I have coffee I don’t really like that much and it’s not the kid’s fault at all. It’s because I forgot that Ethiopian is a mid-dark roast.
It’s more like a heavy black tea than coffee to me, and of course is LOADED with caffeine because dark roasts have less (caffeine leeches out of the beans the longer you roast them). So, I will put up with it for a pound and then go get some French Roast. However, I think my dad is coming next weekend (or something like that, I haven’t received flight info- he travels spur of the moment with all his FF miles). He prefers dark roast, too (Komodo Dragon from Starbucks), but the Ethiopian coffee is so delicate that I want him to try it as well.
“Delicate” is the word I use for coffee that’s not strong enough to stand up to creamer in terms of flavor profile. Like, when you put milk in it, all you can taste is milk because it covers up anything the coffee is bringing. I drink medium roasts with a little simple syrup, no creamer. Medium roast is also sweet and smooth enough not to need sugar….. but not all medium roasts are created equally. Maxwell House is also a medium roast. Two schools of thought there. You can either load it up with milk and sugar so that it doesn’t taste like Maxwell House, or leave it black in hopes of finding some actual coffee flavor somewhere.
Why am I picking on Maxwell House?
None of those coffees are bad. We just bag on them because they’re not GREAT. They’re not supposed to be GREAT. They’re supposed to be affordable. The one truly great coffee that’s better, to me, than any expensive coffee in the world is Cafe Bustelo. It’s a Cuban roast and it’s cheap as shit. Yet, you go to a Cuban restaurant and it’s all they serve because it’s actually from Cuba, or the original roast is. I am guessing that they moved some of their plants to Florida or something because I do not believe that we have a coffee sold nationally in the US that was actually grown in Cuba.
Cigars are the same way. You can’t get Cuban cigars in America unless they’re old as SHIT because they’ve been sitting around since before the embargo. I think I got a Cuban cigar in town town Portland for like, three dollars because it was pre=embargo. It was okay.
Then, I went to Ottawa.
I went to Ottawa on a road trip with Kathleen, my then-wife. We were living in DC and Ottawa was not that far a leap. While we were there, I realized that I could buy Cuban cigars. I counted up my money. I only had enough money for one of them. I bought it for my dad. The trouble was how we were going to get it to him.
I hid it in the springs under the driver’s seat in my car.
Not as hard as advertised, but this was in 2001. I figured that even if I did get caught, it wouldn’t be that big a deal because it was one cigar, not hundreds. I also know that Canadian jails are nicer than ours. It was worth the risk.
I asked my dad to help me decorate my office, and he had me take pictures of the space so he could get an idea of what needed to be done before he got here. He asked me what I wanted my office to look like, and anyone who’s seen my dad’s office knows why I would say “I want it to look just like yours.” Thankfully, his next words were “well, that’s pretty easy to do, actually.”
In terms of trinkets and knickknacks, I know I want to display all my books from Team Mendez, Traci Walder, and Henri Nouwen. I am now laughing about what it looks like when your special interests are intelligence and theology. 😉 I am the holy and the moly all by myself.
It’s amazing how they feed each other, though. So many Biblical stories are well-illustrated with stories about spies. This is because in Jesus’ time, there was no Christianity. They were rebel Jews. They HAD to use tradecraft, and use it well.
The ichthus, or sign of the fish, is one such intelligence operation.
Because it was an intelligence operation, it’s the only Christian tattoo I have. It is important to me as an intelligence operation now, but back then I decided that I wanted to mark myself as a Christian, but I never wanted to wear or promote the cross ever again. Ever in my lifetime. That’s because it will be a cold day in hell before his death instrument means more to me than the way he lived.
If you didn’t grow up in the church, you’re probably wondering what this “intelligence operation” actually is…. or maybe you grew up in a church where they didn’t tell you this story, and you’re going to call up your childhood pastor and say, “why didn’t I know this?” 😉
In the days directly following Jesus’ death, the disciples were rightfully scared they’d be executed as zealots, too. Christianity went into the wind, and everyone developed this piece of tradecraft. You would drag your sandal in an arc. If the other person was a Christian, they would make an arc with their sandal in the other direction, completing the ichthus. We survived underground with oral tradition for a very, very long time. And in fact, most of the Gospels being written down was people being able to write them down….. A LOT of history was oral vs. written back then. Christians are not unique.
However, because it was so long between the oral tradition and written, there are no eyewitness accounts to things like The Sermon on the Mount. It is possible that Jesus could be a fictional person, not that he never lived, but that he lived in many, many people. The INFJ personality is a thousand years old when it is born, yet I am not the only person who has it. It is not impossible that Jesus could be an amalgamation of the personality type, and not one single man.
However, if you believe the story the way it happened, that is okay, too, because I am just spitballing as to what makes the most sense in the modern day and age. I could be, and often am, wrong. Something an atheist said has stuck with me so profoundly that I cannot help but wonder if my assessment is accurate…. that Jesus was not the only person claiming to be the Messiah at the time…….. his was just the story that stuck.
Now I want to carve “the story that stuck” into the topiary hedges in front of my house. God, that’s such a good line. Again, I am FURIOUS I didn’t think of it first.
I am going to the place of Jesus being many people because the historical Jesus is known as an INFJ. If the kind of pastoral care that he exhibits is an actual personality type (most of us end up as pastors, professors, grade school teachers, social workers, etc.), then Jesus is not limited to one body.
But then again, Jesus never was.
He was always designed to be an idea, not a person. Even if Jesus is just one person and you tell the story exactly the way it traditionally goes, God designed Jesus to be an idea and not a person. When he ascended, he began to live in all of us.
When we struck him down, he became more powerful than we could possibly imagine.
I don’t think Jesus ever thought there would be divided camps over his messaging, though. That Evangelicals would twist his message so violently (see: prosperity gospel) that it would take another underground intelligence operation to save the church from itself. And it’s not even that it’s an underground intelligence operation. It’s that Evangelicals are so loud they’re trying to drown out the voices of the disinherited.
They’re trading Martin Luther King, Jr. for Joel Osteen.
They’re treating Christian presidents like Joe Biden and Jimmy Carter like trash and glorifying Donald Trump.
It’s sickening, and it’s why I hope my words are adding to the discussion about what it means to be Christian in America. Evangelicals are so toxic, the most powerful out of malice and the rest out of idiocy.
Christianity is better than that, but if the Evangelicals continue, the church will die. People will get too tired of the hypocrisy and leave in droves. It is already happening, and I am saying that the tide will keep turning. I have met too many people who say that they’re emotionally recovering from what their churches did to them not to believe this is the case. The world is changing too fast for them to course correct.
There is a new intelligence game afoot. The traditional church is dying, so the rest of us are trying to find a new shape in which to drag our sandals.
When I’m writing, I think of it very much like a lecture about me. I am trying to create a video in your head like one Joel Wood or Lia Hatzakis or Paul Cuffaro or any number of YouTubers would make, where they’re just walking down the street and talking to the camera. Paul is walking around his farm and fish room, but it’s the same concept. They all narrate their lives like they’re standing up in front of a crowd. Because my dad was a minister, to me this tracks as a completely normal thing to do. However, my dad didn’t usually preach what’s called a “confessional sermon.” His sermons were generally not about him. Sometimes he would include funny things that happened with my mom, me, and Lindsay that week, but he rarely just put everything on display.
That is my department, and he calls me “Chief.” Because my favorite two spies in the UNIVERSE were called “Chief,” now it pleases me to no end. I’m not Chief of Disguise, but I am chief of……….. Something. I tried to think of a pun, but I’ve not nothin.’ If you think of something that rhymes with “disguise” and also refers to writing/blogging, leave it in the comments. I don’t have prizes, but if it becomes a thing maybe I’ll acquire them. Lanagan Media Group lives to serve. 😉
I should update you all that Bryn’s grandmother died yesterday, so please send her all the love in the world. She already has mine, but that’s not enough. She needs love in groups. Fanagans, do your thing.
I can’t remember who came up with “Fanagans,” so I’m going to pick Dana. The only thing I do know is that it wasn’t me. I don’t have enough self confidence to believe I have fans all over the world even though I do. It’s sometimes too much to take in, that Zac, Supergrover, Bryn, Dana, and I are famous in a very small niche…… However, the reach is literally every country in the world. Since this blog was conceived 11 years ago, I’ve gotten all 208. Just obscure, like Micronesia and Vatican City. I can say that a few are VPNs, bots, etc. I cannot say that for all of them.
In terms of stats, my biggest fan base is in India. Again, this is not surprising to me because there are more people in India, as well as the popularity of the WordPress app/web site there. The next biggest group is the Commonwealth, which I group because it changes at least once a week. Sometimes it’s Canada, sometimes it’s Australia, sometimes it’s Britain. My US following is smaller, but it’s growing every single day as I get more popular on Facebook and I get promoted in the daily prompt. My reader retention rate is enormous. If someone reads once, they’re almost 70% likely to read again, and I have an enormous fan base that reads my entries as soon as they come out. My favorite comment about this has been “we have now reached the point where I am anticipating your entries coming out.”
I hope that I am showing confidence, not arrogance. My self esteem has been in the shitter for a very long time, and the straw that broke the camel’s back was Daniel saying “just because you write in bulk doesn’t mean you say anything of substance.” Well, his professional peer-reviewed ass hasn’t had fans for 24 years. Beat that with a stick.
I do things with intention and purpose. I don’t link to anything to create reader retention unless a prompt has come up where I’ve told the story recently. This allows two things to happen. The first is reader retention. The reason I have it is that I demand it. If you don’t read something, it will move down on the page and it becomes obscure. That creates the OG fan base because my blog has a real “guess you had to be there” feel because otherwise you are going to be using my search feature extensively. People don’t do that. The second thing it accomplishes for my friends is allowing the past to stay passed. Everything blows over easier when they realize that every day is a new piece of paper.
However, thanks to my fans, my archives aren’t bird cage liner. It takes a very long time for people to discover your content on Facebook and WordPress. Some of the entries that are the most shared are two or three years past when it was written. The only thing that took off immediately was my article on marriage. I think it’s hilarious that I wrote a marriage article seen all over the world. That’s because I realized I wasn’t very good at it. Thus, poly and dating Zac because not being married and just having a boyfriend suits me completely. I do not have a need to have multiple partners to be happy. I am happy. The only reason I wanted to be with Daniel as well is that I wanted what’s called an NP, or nesting partner. Zac will never be that for me and I respect his boundaries. I still want so social mask someone because living with someone makes that possible.
In the meantime, I am social masking my housemate and that works well. I have changed my schedule to his, because when I’m alone and have no schedule, I am just as good a writer, but a worse human being. I get demand avoidance over showering, cooking, basically anything until my executive function says “MOVE.” Everything is an emergency with executive dysfunction because your brain cannot plan anything in advance….. Or very little, anyway. You live and die by Google Calendar, because you WILL not remember it if you don’t write it down. I have been late to work because I forgot I had work today (it’s easy to do in a kitchen because your schedule changes weekly). I have never told anyone that before, that I’ve been late because I forgot we were doing work that day. But now I’m spilling it because that’s the disability.
That’s why it’s hard to stay employed, because people think you’re full of shit or a fucking child. People without brain disorders have absolutely no concept, but they become the authority on your mental health if they’re bosses. It’s not a disability, you’re just an indolent asshole.
I’m a good writer because I don’t get demand avoidance over it every single day. Your brain sometimes overrides your disability when it’s a special interest….. Or it happens to me because I’m ADHD as well. If I was simply autistic, I would be 10x more likely to be engrossed in writing to the exclusion of all else, because autistic people are bad at transitions and tend to stay hyper focused on the thing they know the most about. For instance, it being hard to drag Sam away from penguins on “Atypical,” or being able to drag Extraordinary Attorney Woo from whales.
Ok, shows with autistic people. Gotta talk about it.
In a lot of shows about people with disabilities, they’re designed to make the neurotypical person look like the hero caretaker and the autist to need that care. The show isn’t about being autistic, but how kind people are in tolerating our quirks, not caring when it goes overboard into infantilizing an adult. In short, you are not a hero because you manage to put up with me. I mean, thanks, but I don’t ever want a friend who shows up out of pity. I would rather be alone, because I can, again, entertain myself. It is more fun to be alone than to put up with that crap.
My life got better when I stopped allowing it. I sound like I know everything because I just throw emotional bombs down like they’re nothing. I take everything literally, so if you ask me a question, I’m going to be sure in my answer even when I’m not, because the autistic brain is not putting everything through a social convention checklist. Ask a question, get an answer. We can’t care any less when you react to it, because it’s something we can’t do anything about. We either sound like dicks or we don’t talk at all because people just say that we’re dicks when we talk to them. Why bother?
My friends’ biggest problem with me historically is that I call them on their bullshit, they scream “you don’t know me,” and within hours/days they come back and say “I hate it that you’re always right.” It’s relentless, because obviously when I talk people take a defensive tone. I cannot win, so I’ve stopped playing.
My boyfriend and my best friend are on the same page….. Something my friend Sarah Anne said about 15 years ago and it’s apt here. “Just let Leslie be Leslie, and let the world fall in love.” It is the most profound thing anyone has ever said, and it wasn’t about my career and my friends’ attitudes toward it, but it’s the perfect fit. She was giving me advice on preaching, when my world was quite a bit smaller.
I often wonder if the people who’ve visited me from Vatican City have stolen lines from me, because I know it’s possible. I’m confident that I’m a good enough preacher to rip off blind. And remember, I don’t need to be a hero. It’s not important to be recognized when there’s a possibility you just gave a Cardinal something to say on Sunday morning.
Because I write about success and things that are interesting to powerful people, like leadership, I think of my fan base as small, but with abilities no one else has. A lot of my audience is more successful than I am. Margaret Cho comes to mind, but I don’t have any evidence that she’s a fan. She just Tweeted my marriage article on Twitter. Sharing one article doesn’t mean she came back, but it doesn’t not mean that, either. I have no idea who is reading based on my web stats unless they’re a part of the WordPress community and leave a like within the app. You have to have an account with WordPress to do that. Everyone else just clicks on the link from Facebook, Reddit, et al. Margaret Cho is not my only reader with that much clout, so my assessment that my audience is small but powerful is correct and I feel solid about it. I have been underestimating my abilities my whole life.
Daniel’s words pushed me to the fucking wall and I thought, “ENOUGH. You just watched Jonna Mendez own herself in front of an entire room of people and she likes your writing and she likes you. She would not think it was impossible that I could do the same. You can’t think of yourself as a shitty writer anymore. Man up.” There is no universe in which I think I couldn’t give an interview at the Spy Museum because they already know me there. It’s just that currently, I don’t have a book to promote. Maybe I’ll do a nonfiction on NASA and CIA or something, but I’d have to find something Vince Houghton didn’t in “Nuking the Moon.” It’s just easy money if the book is good because people genuinely like that topic.
I absolutely do not think I could fail at writing nonfiction, because that’s what I do every single day. I just need an editor because I clean up nice.
It’s an idea to read Zac in on helping me with a nonfiction book, because not only can he edit me, he can fact check me as well. Like, holy shit, the perfect boyfriend dropped into my lap…………… Because I got the confidence to ask for it. I asked Zac out, not the other way around. I’m getting a lot of things these days by asking for them, and it’s sort of embarrassing how long I didn’t know that. I was an arrested teenager for years. I couldn’t set boundaries in relationships for anything in the world because I didn’t know how. I’ve felt steamrolled in every relationship because I was a people pleaser. Once I just started throwing truth bombs on the table and keeping the friends who stayed, I was a lot happier than having friends who I tiptoed around because my self-esteem wasn’t high enough to participate in a give and take. I got love by pleasing other people. Now, I just pick friends that allow themselves the luxury of having productive fights that make you closer, because you’re not holding in all the things that make the other person annoying because you just let them keep annoying you without saying anything and letting MASSIVE resentment build.
It’s not okay, building massive resentment. It will always backfire. Instead of a happy relationship, you’re focusing on yourself and telling yourself that you’re not getting anything because no one notices you. There’s no award for trying to be good enough that your parents don’t see you as a problem child. Your needs going unmet is a you thing, not a them thing. When you say nothing, you become part of the problem.
In America, the word freedom is counterfeit kindness, because we can talk the talk better than anyone in the world. Who doesn’t know Americans are free? Meanwhile, you’re trapped as a minority or when you’re poor. You cannot fix your minority status with money in all cases. In the words of Chris Rock, “Clarence Thomas in a jogging suit can’t even get a cab in DC.” The horrible thing is that Clarence Thomas doesn’t have a problem with this. He does not want to show anything about him that makes him different. He wants to be the white, cis, straight, male ideal by dismantling all the racial protections around him, and he’s been bitter about Affirmative Action since college, because no one treated him like he got into school on his own merit.
I am FURIOUS at Thomas because of this, but I also cannot place blame on him, either. Wanting to uphold the system is borne of ENORMOUS pain. Just enormous. Just imagine it. “You’re not that smart. You’re only here because you’re black.” Jesus H. Christ on a pogo stick you have GOT to be kidding me. White people fucked him up long before he graduated from college. It’s hard to imagine Thomas as a kid, but if you stand in that pain and really feel it, you can see why he’s such a mess today. Clarence Thomas didn’t go crazy all by himself. White people helped tremendously. If you cannot understand why that dude is COMPLETELY messed up, it’s because he’s trying to uphold a system not built for him AND saying that it doesn’t have to change because it was good enough to make him a Supreme Court judge. It’s the equivalent of being spanked.
You don’t realize as a child when you’re being spanked that it sets up how you’re going to treat other children for life……….. If you don’t go to a MOUNTAIN of therapy. As in, if you were spanked as a child, you probably think it’s okay to hit your kids, too. I mean, you turned out all right, right? The last time my mother spanked me was when I realized being hit was bullshit and I was bigger than her. I didn’t hit her back, or strike first. I was just strong enough to wriggle out of her grasp. My father spanked me, too, but that’s only when I was really little. As I got older and he could reason with me, this changed to deep discussions about behavior and consequences. Neither of them spanked me again. But was it abnormal of them? Of course not. It was like, 1981 or something. Different times, different prevailing attitude on discipline from experts.
Corporal punishment is the only institutional pain I can think of that transcends race and money. In Texas, my favorite way this is expressed is “boy, I am gon’ slap the white right off if you don’t behave.” I would never say that to a child now, but I heard it in the grocery store growing up…… Therefore, if the prevailing attitudes toward corporal punishment hadn’t changed and I’d become a parent, I probably would have spanked my kids, too. It didn’t start with me, it wouldn’t end with me. Culture changed around me.
And that’s what’s happening now. The institutional cycle of parents and children learning what it’s like to punish and be punished is something universal that just might explain the pain of institutional racism to white people. What white people don’t realize is that their hate toward minorities teaches minorities how to act amongst themselves. It takes a mountain of work to have self esteem when minorities just aren’t as good as white people and homosexuality is a sin and trans people don’t exist.
I finally found the antidote to Daniel’s poison….. “just because you write in bulk doesn’t mean you write anything of substance.” This is a comment on an entry that took 15 minutes to write:
I disagree with Donald Trump the most, but he’s not interesting. He’s a Flat Stanley, except Flat Stanley is a book series for children and Trump is a child. Calling Trump a Flat Stanley is just bullying Flat Stanley. Please respect his privacy during this difficult time.
Trump is the one person I can think of in my writing life that I cannot turn into a 3D character. There is no way to show his humanity, compassion, intelligence, etc. He has not given us any evidence to support the fact that he has any of those things.
Supergrover said that I portrayed her as a “Flat Stanley.” That is objectively not true, but that’s not the point. The point is that I had to look him up and it became an apt description for him, not her. When I think of her, my brain lights up like an animation of The Flash running up the side of a building. She’s amazing. She’s also human. People have problems, full stop. I only disagree with her because I have written many times about how many different things I love about her. Talking about both our problems and our successes is what makes her a 3D character. I haven’t talked about all the things I love about her in a long time because she hasn’t given me much to love lately.
And she never will again, I don’t think, because the kind of bravery that she showed in her last letter is what I require all the time. That’s not her. I’m not the person that will walk on eggshells trying to do things right because I’m guessing how she feels. Doesn’t praise me for anything I do right, comes down HARD on me when I do wrong. She can go and make other people jump high. I’m done. Either she breaks the power imbalance between us or she can find someone else to put through her mental marathon.
It’s hard to feel lonely when you’re right next to someone, and yet I felt it constantly- and not because we weren’t constantly in touch. She thought I was jumping up and down for attention by making her feel bad all the time. I thought she was being very selfish in withholding information because it made it so easy to yell at me for things that happened because I guessed wrong instead of actually knowing what she wanted and needed from me. Most of the time, I believe that was straight up nothing, but that wasn’t always the case.
It’s really simple to me.
She has loved me more than I’ve ever realized because she won’t talk about it. She just doesn’t stop showing up. She’s not the kind of person that constantly says “I love you” all the time. From her, “I love you” means “what are you going to do for a paying job now? I’m concerned.” “I love you” looks like no one would ever know that someone who was mean to me is now under her pool. “I love you” looks like “I got you some books for your Kindle.” “I love you” looks like “really great post today.” “I love you” looks like accepting me for who I am. We just have terrible communication despite all that acceptance. Hurt compounds on both sides. Neither of us are bad people, we just set up bad patterns and haven’t done the work. I’m not offended. She probably wouldn’t do the work with anyone, because then she’d have to dig deep into herself to find the answers and it is so scary……. I know. I know it’s so scary. But you don’t find out that you’re walking backwards though the dark to find daylight, choosing to stay trapped where you are.
It wasn’t my job to fix everything. It was my job to participate in fixing everything. I have no buy-in, so that chapter of my life is over. I know that I have an incredible future coming because I am owning my own destiny. I also know she’s invited, but not if every day looks like tearing me down or avoiding me. It’s not sustainable. It affected my mental health to no end, this scrambling to do the right thing while the game was set up for me to always lose. There was never any future, there was only “make me feel good with your writing.” What I know to be true is that she really does treasure the things that I’ve said. That they are valuable to her. But this is what I do. I talk about my life. If we’re not getting along, I’m not going to make it up for my web site.
You cannot stop being a Dooce fan because she “stopped being real” and then throw a shit fit when I’m real with other people. The reason Supergrover is upset is that I based my entire blog on what I think because she stopped telling me anything. I was wandering around trying to figure out everything on my own so that she could sit in judgment that I didn’t divine her needs out of thin air. It cost me more time and energy than I had to give. I hurt her and spent a very, very, very long time trying to heal the rift. She was avoidant at every turn and I became disenchanted because not every problem is because I’m a judgmental dickhead and you’re the most loving person on earth. It’s that she can dish it, but she can’t take it. She can call me a judgmental dickhead all day long, but she cannot hear that her behavior is also problematic.
She told me that she lost the ability to be a decent friend. It would have been excellent if she’d told me that when I said, “is anything wrong? You seem distant” ad nauseam for eight years. I wasted my time, and I know it. I’m not bitter about it, but I know it’s true. I also know that she is capable of monster manipulation if she can say she’s lost the ability to be a decent friend and that her mama wolverine claws are coming in within days/weeks of each other. It’s humiliating, really, because I lived for the ups without seeing the downs.
It did not make her less special to me, less amazing, less anything. She’s human. Just because we’ve gotten angry at each other before doesn’t mean I now want to hug her any less than I did on day one. But what I do know is that if such a thing were to happen, it would be because she started letting me know how she is thinking and feeling so that I don’t have to guess. I’m not in the business of anticipating needs anymore. If you can’t communicate, you don’t get to say that’s my fault. If you won’t communicate, you don’t get to step all over my ass because I tried to open a discussion and you don’t want to talk. That’s not the friend I met, that’s not the friend I want.
For me, “I love you” looks like “I picked up your afternoon coffee.” “I love you” looks like remembering you on every birthday and holiday. “I love you” looks like waiting quietly for the storm to pass, because there’s so much about our relationship I celebrate. And I don’t even mean this storm. I mean waiting between letters. I didn’t want to be stuck in dysfunction junction, but here we are. However, it takes two people to have a dysfunctional relationship. None of this is all her fault. She has her own list of things that are horrible about me and she’s right. Because I’m human. I do just as much wrong as everyone else. I also know that if I was a public figure, I would have said, “me.” I disagree with me all the time. That’s generally why I post.
So, Trump is the public figure I disagree with the most…. but, again…… he’s not interesting.
I update my blog so frequently because of how blogs work. When you update an entry, it sends a ping to search engines, the WordPress community, everyone. The more often you ping them, the more exposure you get. The reason I don’t *always* post several times a day is that Sometimes I think 10,000 words at a time. Sometimes I think 50. I am not known for being terse. Every thought comes with bonus content. When you see something flip to a completely different subject, it’s what I was writing about, then went to something else, then forgot that text was at the bottom. I am not nearly as scrambled as I seem, because most of the incoherence can be chalked up to “I forgot.”
I am detail oriented, but the details don’t come all at once. They come in as information does. I will have thoughts about every new piece of information because I’ll be collating it with what I already know to be true. Things change fast, therefore so does my web site. This is because it’s my space, the one place where I’m allowed to own it because no one asked you to be here. And I mean it. If you can’t recognize that I have agency over my own story, then your beliefs carry no inherent respect, either. That’s because if you don’t think I’m allowed to have an opinion, why should I even bother listening to yours?
I got tired of Supergrover using me as an emotional support animal, only being pleased to hear from me when it was convenient to her. She can call me the asshole for it all she wants, but that doesn’t make it untrue. She breadcrumbed me for like, eight years. Every time I tried to walk away, she got back in touch. Every single time. She was right to be angry and walk off the first time. I got tired about the 30th.
She can say I’m demanding of her time, but she opened up about how she felt and said she was enjoying writing. She also said that she was going to “offer her own psychobabble,” and she sounded JUST LIKE ME. Like, she has my patois dead to rights. Or I have hers. Chicken and egg, but I tend to say that she’s the original and I’m the copy.
It’s a lot to be told you’re a lot, and expect respect without giving it while also ignoring the fact that you’re a lot. She’s never done anything wrong, I’m a dickhead.
Yeah, that tracks. That’s what a healthy relationship looks like, that one person is always wrong no matter what they do. To add insult to injury, me telling her for years that it felt like a cat and mouse game while she continually said that she wasn’t manipulative while she manipulated me. That’s because some of her last words were “I do not want to get back into the cat and mouse game with you.” Which one of us is the cat here? Sometimes, she was full of love. Sometimes, she was full of piss and vinegar. The same could be said of me, but I was willing to talk it through so that we didn’t have these issues anymore. We could start actually enjoying each other instead of both turning into bitches on wheels every time we disagree.
It’s not her fault. It’s just as much mine. But she runs from her emotions, and I don’t. It is problematic, and the only answer was to let her go back to what she’s used to in life. if I’m the only person that ever gives her problems, which I don’t doubt because she’d never open up enough to offend any of her friends, then I am out permanently. You don’t get to walk around in my inner landscape and call me a judgmental dickhead for nearly every opinion I have.
I spent two paragraphs telling her about a situation with someone else and how I’d mishandled it. She responded that I was so judgmental and needed to back off and all this bullshit that I’d explained to her in my letter already. I did not need additional reproach. She reads so quickly that she misses a lot, and gets very angry if I say she’s missed something because she’s perfect. I called her on it, that she was reading too fast and I got these messages in quick succession:
“I read too fast. I meant that I am not angry. If you are, have at it.”
“Don’t insinuate/insult me/something like that I don’t read your stuff.”
I told her that I wasn’t basing my response on anything but timestamps, that I was not guilting her. It didn’t make a damn bit of difference. She made a mistake. Obviously all my fault.
Fuck me running.
Now that I can move away from all of it and call bullshit, pings mean more than she does. That’s because I can’t count on a future with anyone but me.
Luckily, I’m turning out to be a fun person to hang out with.
It makes me happy today that I realized Bert from Sesame Street is coded as autistic. He has a paper clip and bottle cap collection. He likes to do like, five things. Anything else is annoying. He talks like he knows everything.
My combination of physical and mental maladies make it where it’s hard to stay employed. I have gotten many jobs in many fields, and I’ve enjoyed all of them. I’ve just never managed to last long enough at anything to establish a career. When you are neurotypical, it does not make sense to you why I would get fired. And then I listen to how you talk about your coworkers and in instantaneously becomes clear. No matter how loving and open you think you are, neurotypical people do not like working with neurodivergent ones. Whether it’s that someone doesn’t like their tone or they’re doing something completely wrong doesn’t matter. In an office, there is very little difference in simply being annoying and ACTUALLY being bad at the job. It matters that you’re pleasant just as much as you’re competent. Not wanting to work with someone is just a valid reason to let someone go, because it’s not the boss’s job to babysit.
However, my survival cannot be dependent on neurotypical people, either. My livelihood is threatened by my own body- demand avoidance, burnout, and meltdown being the big three. I can cope and muddle through in a job. I excel when I sit down at my keyboard to tell you about the world around me. I am not thinking about all the ways I could be criticized, which is good, because If blowback was always my first thought I would not be doing well. I would be over focusing on people who didn’t like my writing while ignoring people who do. That doesn’t seem healthy, going out of my way to focus on the negative.
I keep thinking about what Daniel said…. “Just because you write in bulk doesn’t mean you say anything of substance.” It plays like a tape in my head, and what I have to remember is that whether it’s good or bad, being able to go back and read about what my life was like in years past is invaluable. If you asked me what I was doing five years ago today, I could probably tell you. I just have to remember that Daniel was miserable and trying to hurt me. I notice that lots of people treat me like absolute SHIT and then say, “I’m not going to be the villain in your story.”
I also have a problem with consequences equaling negativity. I didn’t tell you that Daniel or Supergrover was a bad person. I told you what happened. BOTH of them are extraordinarily defensive and nothing is ever their fault and you’re a really bad person no matter what they did, because they don’t like to feel. Anything you do to make them feel is suspicious. They googled it, and they do not like it.
My life got so much better when I decided I was tired as fuck of both of them. I am a storyteller, therefore I don’t need any “friends.” I need actual friends, ones who believe they are capable of making mistakes instead of coming unglued when they’ve hurt me and I said something about it.
According to them, I should just keep my mouth shut because their bad behavior is good. It’s me telling people about it that’s problematic. If their behavior was so perfectly perfect in every way, they would not get mad that I wrote about it.
I am not going to let them make me a victim by insisting that I keep my mouth shut over things they did that genuinely hurt me. Neither of them gave a damn about me and my pain. They wanted to be hero-worshiped and showed up every single day to hear me extol their virtues and lost their everliving SHIT when they realized I was going to treat them like a normal person and not play them up to be gods among men. However, I don’t NOT do that, either. I love the people in my life and I often write glowing things about them that make me cry. But when I’m not being glowing, it’s not that I’m hurt. It’s that I’m a bad person because I opened my mouth.
That pattern seems on brand. You’re only as sick as your secrets.
So, instead of fighting with friends and coworkers, I would rather record my life and move in the direction of my own system rather than trying to fit into someone else’s. Because needing their love and approval got me nowhere, I replaced them with self-confidence.
I am not trying to be hard nosed. I am trying to own my story. The part that they’re angry about is that I am not telling the story the way they want to hear it………………… While never even DARING to have the guts wo write their own. It’s easier to bitch at me…………… But absolutely nothing will keep either of them from lurking and fuming. There’s not a chance either of them will just go the fuck away and leave me alone.
Repeat with anyone that has ever known me, because I generally end up talking to myself. It’s how being autistic is. You rarely have friends because you’re social masking and there’s something officious and off-putting about it. I don’t care if you think that’s annoying. I just ask that you stop interacting with me rather than bitching about my writing. My writing lives within me and around me. You ain’t shit.
It’s not that my friends aren’t valuable. They cannot give me direction and focus. That’s all on me. And until they start digging deep, they’ll never understand how hard it is. They’d rather be locked down, hurt, and lashing out at me. Thankfully, that has stopped because I stopped allowing it.
Supergrover does not get the right to absolutely shit all over everything and then walk off like nothing happened. She participated, and now acts like she’s a motherfucking hero and I’m a mental patient.
I have told this story recently, so here’s a link. We can talk about other stuff because I don’t want to write about the concert when I have nothing new to add- except that I have the most wonderful boyfriend in the entire world. I was very surprised that he liked the concert enough to buy a CD, because he came to the concert because he likes me, not jazz. If you’re going to get your first jazz CD, though, Jason Moran is a good one. I still cannot believe that I got to hear him in concert for free so often in high school. Not only were there the concerts at night, but Jason and two of his best friends, John Schutza and Eric Harland, did a Happening at PVA.
A Happening is an art experience that appeared kind of like a flash mob. You didn’t know whether there was going to be a Happening at lunch or not. You’d be sitting there eating your chicken tenders and tater tots and then one of the art areas appeared with a presentation out of nowhere. The funniest were the theater kids writing a skit that made fun of us. I can’t remember what they said about Vocal and Instrumental, but the dancers got that their favorite foods were Tab, cigarettes, and ice.
When I heard that joke the first time around, I nearly had to be resuscitated, and I started laughing so hard even today that tears are in my eyes. The other thing that the theater department said absolutely destroyed me, because it was so true. That you get into HSPVA and want tattoos and earrings and purple hair and the whole nine yards…… but counterculture is being preppy……. like no one here ever dyes their hair.…….. 🙄
I always dressed like a prepster. The only thing remotely hippie-ish about me back then was that I had Birkenstocks, which I did wear with socks because they’re more comfortable that way. Plus, back then lots of people wore socks with sandals. Trends go in and out.
Speaking of trends, Crocs come to mind. They were cool, and now there’s a backlash with one exception. They’re kind of a mating call to be able to identify other cooks in nature. Line cooks and nurses will keep Crocs in business for years to come. However, I will say that I do pay extra for the professional kitchen version. They’re not basic Crocs because they have both non-slip tread AND padded insoles. The reason they’re so nice is that when you’re working standing up, your feet swell. Crocs let you be comfortable in spite of that.
I should get another pair in plain black, but I can’t justify it when I have a pair of Bistro Crocs (non-slip tread and no holes, but without the insole) in navy blue. The ones that are the most comfortable are a tie-dye pattern. Perfect for the kitchen but don’t match every outfit. The navy blue ones are really nice because with jeans, they don’t stand out. I have huge problems staying upright and Crocs are great in terms of my shoes not getting in the way of me being able to keep my balance. I have tried more expensive clogs, like Dansko, and the heel was too high for me. If every step wasn’t absolutely certain, I’d go down in a heap. So, if I didn’t wear work Crocs, I’d go back to Birkenstocks. It’s not a fashion issue for me because to me, it’s more embarrassing to fall in public. If another adult makes fun of my shoes, they’re the asshole. Full stop. Cerebral palsy is hard enough to manage without worrying about how I look.
It actually feels like Crocs are an accommodation with the amount of joy they bring into my life, and I am not kidding. They do not irritate my sensory issues with autism, they don’t irritate my arthritis because my feet are so well padded, and allow me to feel the ground better than I could in dress shoes. I even like hiking in my Crocs because I can feel the terrain better, and stand in running water. Crocs don’t breathe, so to me it’s better to wear them without socks on the hiking trail. Your feet will be the same amount of warm because your shoes will dry so fast. You won’t be walking around in wet socks, which always made me a lot colder.
I don’t go on any hiking trails that are so advanced I would need special shoes, although I do like hiking boots or trainers with hiking tread. However, I think hiking sandals are superior because they’ve got the stability of a hiking boot and dry quickly. If you’re hiking in any elevation, your wet socks will keep making you miserable as you climb. And, of course, your feet are sweating, which makes it where they’ll never dry all the way.
That’s pretty much all I know about hiking in a nutshell. Socks and shoes are more important than anything else, because anything that happens on the trail is made better by feeling secure in your own body and movements.
Zac and Oliver, who is a dog, both like to hike. We’ve been on the trails in the nature preserve behind his house, but we’ve also talked about going out to Great Falls. I like to do strenuous hiking before the dead of summer sets in, so it may not be something we can plan for this year. It remains on the table, however.
We haven’t even planned our next date, but as I told him, it doesn’t have to “be” anything. We could just watch “Slow Horses.” What we do on our date nights is entirely dependent on our energy levels in the after work time period, because generally even when it’s a weekend date, he’s had drill. Because I’m an introvert, my idea of a good time is only getting out of my house. To me, it is just as good to get out of my house by going and sitting around at someone else’s. I have changed locations, therefore I have accomplished my goal and that is achievement enough. Things like going to see Jason Moran and going to the Spy museum are the exceptions, not the norm.
When we were with Bryn and Dave, we went to a pub that had fried food that Bryn could eat because they had gluten free batter. We ate and drank our weights in junk food and soda (except for Zac. He was good and only had fizzy water. Meanwhile, I am like “ELEVEN DIET COKES! THIS IS GREAT!” I often make people regret that restaurants in the US give free refills.
Speaking of which, I was talking to some other redditors who were poking fun at people who order a Super Sized Big Mac meal and a Diet Coke. I said that I didn’t drink it because I needed to lose weight, I drink it because I like what I LIKE. Apparently, I was the hero they needed over something insignificant, because a ton of people replied with “THIS.” I think A LOT of people growing up in the 80s learned to prefer Diet Coke because it was marketed to women (of course). If that’s what’s in the house, that’s what I’m going to drink. I preferred Sugar Free Dr Pepper to Diet Coke, but they were both good (I don’t remember what year Dr Pepper changed the name to Diet Dr Pepper). Many, many people have my same story, that their mothers fed them diet soda when they were kids and now regular syrup is too cloying and makes your teeth feel weird.
Plus, I feel like diet sodas are getting better and better. I am very impressed with Pepsi Max, all of the Mountain Dew Zero flavors, and the emphasis on seltzer instead of soda overall. And in fact, La Croix may have discontinued it by now, but they had a cola flavor that no one agreed with me was good. I liked it because I felt healthier drinking fizzy water with a hint of cola flavor and no caffeine.
Speaking of fizzy water, David has a Soda Stream and I am FREAKING OUT. Zac has one at his house, and it is so wonderful that I’ve thought of buying one many times. I just didn’t know how it would work out in terms of cost- buying cans/bottles of seltzer vs. the canisters. Now, it’s MUCH cheaper because I don’t have to pay for the machine AND the refills. I don’t expect David to absorb that entire cost because I will drink the hell out of that water and I don’t think he’s as fond of it.
I also don’t need any syrups unless I just wanted them, because I already have fresh lemon and two kinds of bitters. I’m also a huge fan of adding seltzer to apple or orange juice. I am sure that fizzy apple juice is just as bad for you as soda due to the amount of sugar in it, but I don’t care. I get calories where I can find them. I am not the best eater on the planet, a common neurodivergent trait. I do not mean that I have sensory issues with food. I love food, all of it. I just choose to eat sandwiches most days because not every meal has to be entertainment. My struggle is with time. My body does not let me know when it needs to eat. My executive function will go 12 hours without a bite and then ALL OF A SUDDEN I will want to eat Tokyo.
I don’t gain any weight because even though I eat like a prize fighter, I go entirely too long between meals. If I set a timer to remind myself to eat, I find quickly that it doesn’t work because I cannot MAKE myself hungry. I cannot force feed myself into an eating routine because AuDHD doesn’t create routines well, if at all. If something is happening and my body doesn’t want it to, it shuts down. If my brain doesn’t want me to eat, demand avoidance over cooking because with executive dysfunction, everything is do it now. Your brain cannot manage eating to prevent hunger in the future. I get hungry, I eat. I do not want to put emotional energy into forcing myself.
Thus, sandwiches. They take a minute to make, therefore I can afford to eat on a whim rather than planning to cook dinner in advance. Instead of forcing myself to do things, I adapted my diet instead.
Eggs are also quick and easy, and pretty much the healthiest thing I eat because I mix them with so many vegetables. I have been vegan in the past, but have been priced out of it in terms of protein, or at least, most of the time. Sometimes I’ll find Beyond on sale and that’s great. I just find it easier to buy protein based on cost, because I was only trying to charge my brain with super food in the first place. I’m a line cook. I don’t have anything against eating animals. I do, however, have a problem with factory farming.
Temple Grandin is one of my culinary heroes, and I’m betting it’s something most people wouldn’t recognize as culinary. She made serving steak more humane for all of us, but I’ve been in an industry for a long time that prizes kindness to animals. Kindness to animals keeps stress hormones out of the meat. We need the meat at our restaurants, but there is no reason to make an animal feel pain. Small family ranchers have known this for years. Temple just adjusted that idea to fit a larger scale.
I still can’t remember the last time I bought red meat, though. I’ll have a burger or fried chicken occasionally, but mostly I exist on eggs, cheese, spring mix with spinach, and popcorn. Not all mixed together.
I like warm salads with fried eggs on top and a little sesame oil and rice wine vinegar, or balsamic if I’ve used butter. Spinach and salad greens are ridiculously healthy and taste decadent with some butter, salt, and garlic. If I do scrambled eggs, it’s always Florentine so that I Popeye it up. I also do the same thing with tofu or Just Egg. Vegan eggs taste identical to the real thing, or at least, Just Egg does. But I know there has to be more than one brand, because my local vegan fast food joint, PLNT burger, used to have egg sandwiches that were eighty times better than a McMuffin (it was the caramelized onions).
I really like vegan junk food because it makes me feel healthier. It’s not that it’s less calories, it’s the kind of calories that you’re getting. There might be a lot of fat in something, but it probably won’t be as saturated…. for instance, vegan poutine has less saturated fat than cheese curds made of cow’s milk. I am not kidding myself into believing that I am doing myself some big, grand service by switching to vegan junk food. However, it might prevent me from having such a BAD heart attack, anyway……. 😉
In short, the way my diet has changed is that I’ve been at both ends of the spectrum, and ovo-lacto vegetarian fits me the best if you were trying to pigeonhole me. I do eat meat, just not often enough for it to be a major part of my diet. That will never change. I feel that the way to cut down on factory farming in this country is to stop telling yourself that you need meat as protein with every meal.
If you don’t like texturized vegetable protein and other “fake meats” like Beyond and Impossible, you can always use eggs, cheese, peanut butter, and chocolate. Presumably not in the same dish.
I am most involved with online communities, because I prefer to type than to speak. It’s not that I’m not a good time in person, I just get tongue tied and like the safety of using a keyboard. It has led to very mixed results, because most of the time, it’s just a communication tool. Occasionally, it brings out the worst in me. I have to be careful with it, because I become disconnected with the world of Outdoors and In Person.
And it’s not even really that I become tongue-tied. I become inauthentic. I start social masking and it feels like putting on a show rather than it being natural to my personality. That person hides every single thing about her that makes her unique so that she cannot possibly be offensive to anyone at any time. I become the me that’s appropriate for very large gatherings of people. I haven’t been a public speaker all my life, but my dad has (he was a minister in the UMC). Therefore, I am not that person, but I can social mask it. I fail because invariably there’s going to be something that makes the mask look like a lie. Maybe to other people, definitely to me. That personality is based on my mother, the loving preacher’s wife who lived to serve…… As in, my social mask is not “leader” but “support person.” I think it’s why I thought I’d be such a a good friend for Supergrover. It is extraordinarily true that my hormones grabbed me by my guts for a little minute, but none of the things I wanted to offer her long term were predicated or dependent upon her turning into a teenager as well.
In short, I know how to support a big shot.
I just, frankly, am not my mother and I never will be. I start all my taking care of her schtick, and things go great until I try to speak truth to power. It’s not because Supergrover is inflexible or hard-nosed. She doesn’t trust me. We didn’t used to have this problem, and now we do. In effect, I thought I could be so spectacular a friend that she would realize that she shouldn’t hold me to my worst mistake. So far, I have gotten a few brownie points, but things have never gone back to normal. I would say that the operation was a whispering success. 😉 She relaxed on some things, not on others. The one thing I refused to be was impressed. Me being impressed would have been the death knell, because she wouldn’t have liked it if I thought being friends meant parroting back her own opinions to her, either. I have never been a “yes man,” and SG was not my cue to start.
I am not impressed with anything that would make her impressive to anyone else, and that’s what makes her valuable to me. It’s like HSPVA to me. Mireille Enos is not valuable to me because she’s one of the most talented actresses in the world. She is valuable to me because she was a senior that smiled at me in high school when I was a freshman. I have never been crushed out on her, I was just an insecure ninth grader and for a moment, I wasn’t. I also don’t value her movie star looks, because in my head we’re both children. I love that I know War from “Good Omens,” but I know her from one of the smallest stages in the world- the black box at the second oldest location of HSPVA.
I have mentioned that I saw her as the lead in “Diary of Anne Frank.” What I did not say is that when the Nazis arrived to take the family away, actors dropped from the catwalk in their battle rattle and scared the ever living SHIT out of all of us. It was really VERY effective.
In terms of community, artists are a good one. I remember another play the theater department did for Black History month that celebrated diversity. There were four actors on stage dressed completely in black and with bags over their heads (see thru, presumably….). They start talking and one is clearly Asian, one is clearly Central American, one is clearly white, and one is clearly black. They talk for about three minutes, all of them sounding as stereotypical as they possibly can. Every trope in the book comes out and they’re just flinging the things people say about them on stage while the crowd is roaring with laughter.
Then.
There’s a hush and a gasp in the audience when they take the bags off their heads and no one’s race matched up to their voice. It was just masterful, and I’m so glad that was part of my high school experience. I didn’t have as many kindred spirits as Clements, and I missed PVA terribly both years I didn’t go. But at the same time, I did get to be in marching band for a season, and although I didn’t choose to continue with it, I’m glad I have the story to tell now.
I got to play some stuff at Clements that I never would have at PVA because frankly, our band was better than PVAs by a large margin, like, a provable amount. My junior year, literally the first time I’d ever been in the band, we went to Texas Music Educator’s Association as the Sudler Flag winners. The Sudler flag is an award for excellence in music education. The band was already pretty good before I got there. Although I was told it was good that I transferred because a lot of their more capable trumpet players that had gotten the band the award in the first place had graduated. It was nice to feel appreciated, because I know I wasn’t the best in the world, but I was a great utility player. I didn’t have to be first chair. I was glad I got to go to San Antonio at all. Get this. I never made first chair at Clements (I don’t think…. If I did, I didn’t have it long enough to be memorable). For a very long time, though, I was third. THIRD out of the best trumpet players in the state according to TMEA. I wasn’t the gold medalist, but I was still on the podium.
I owe my success in band at Clements to Norman and Danny, the trumpet players that babied me along until I could stand on my own two feet at HSPVA. They were not dismissive or mansplaining, because we were trying to achieve a beautiful sectional sound. It was more like being picked for the Olympics with Norman and Danny as my coaches. In the symphony, you may be first chair, but the parts are not divided by voice. As in, just because you’re second or third chair doesn’t mean your part is going to be less complicated or not as high. I mean, it probably is if it’s a classical piece that’s been rewritten for younger players, but we were reading straight off the original “charts.”
It’s like reading the Gospel of Mark in the original Greek instead of the King James version. For instance, reading Bach in the original German in terms of stage notes and the key signature, which were called different things in his time. The only one I can remember off the top of my head is that B minor is H mol. That’s because I’ve also done Bach’s B Minor Mass, or Mass in H mol, at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral as a soprano.
It was an early music concert, so period instruments as well. After one of the rehearsals, I asked one of the trumpet players if I could try his horn and he let me. It was a very warm sound, similar to a Monette (famous for being unlaquered). My arms were a little short for the valves, so I was grateful to be in the community as a singer and not an instrumentalist….. Although it is fun being able to say that I can play the precursor to the trumpet as well.
When I first moved to Silver Spring, I was involved in choir. I may do it again someday, because I’d like to get back into being a musician. It’s a whole mood. You feel so much adrenaline after rehearsals and concerts that your mood naturally feels lighter and bubblier once they’re over. The reason that even though it’s just rehearsal and your adrenaline still goes up is the competition, and it is relentless. I do not mean that we snipe at each other, I mean the quest for excellence is relentless. I am not competing against anyone in my choir, but to be a better singer than I was the day before. Again, I have been asked to solo for things, so I know I’m capable of it. However, I am most comfortable as a utility player in a choir as well. I can hit high notes, but I am not a diva. I think the altos have more interesting parts, anyway.
I am more on an alto wavelength, because what I’ve found over time is that more altos can read music than sopranos. I think that’s because the alto part is generally more complicated; you can pick a melody out of thin air, but generally not the supporting notes in a chord. Alto parts are usually more complicated rhythmically as well. It has created a stigma that sopranos are airheads. This is not NECESSARILY true………….. There is a huge difference between singers who have taken lessons on instruments and singers who haven’t, because dollars to donuts they were trained in solfege and not reading the notes off the page.
I am not ashamed to admit that I thought solfege was stupid, and I haven’t been proved wrong. But that’s not because I’m not open to solfege for other people. It does work, just not if you’ve already learned to read music first. If you know how to read music, you know there is no need to bring hand movement into things. Yet, we still had to do the hand movements. I never learned them. I just made Spock’s little hand sign thingme and moved it up and down. Mission accomplished.
Because my mother was a pianist and my dad was a trumpet player, I know I learned to read music early, but I can’t remember by how much., as opposed to kids learning in school. I think I was six, because my mother’s rule in taking piano students was that they had to be able to reach an octave. As in, the thumb can be on middle C and their pinky can comfortably hit the C above. I didn’t start band, however, until I was in grade five. So, 10, I think? What I do know is that I already knew how to read music before a horn was ever put into my hands.
Singing is very hard on your body, but in a good way. As in, you’ll exercise muscles you don’t normally use and it will hurt until you get used to it. The workout keeps getting more and more productive, less and less irritating. I know I am on the right track when I can lift a heavy book with my diaphragm alone.
I just thought of something funny. Dana’s mom said, “that voice! Where did it come from?” I realized I would not be lying if my answer had been that it was Biblical, because the book I use the most frequently to work out those muscles is an Interpreter’s Bible.
I’d like to be able to run with the big boys there, too. For instance, I think Father Nathan Monk is the bees knees, because he’s already doing what I’ve always wanted to do, which is minister to people no matter what they believe. Just because there’s no God in it doesn’t mean it’s not church. Secular humanism is valid. People want to live in community and help each other whether they believe there’s a higher power or not.
Father Nathan spent many years in the church before he became an atheist, and I would argue, a better priest in the process. He’s also queer, poly, neurodivergent, and from the way he writes, probably an INFJ as well. I’ve just been watching him on Facebook for a while, and it seems like we have a lot in common. He’d be one of those guys I’d like to host on a podcast about success, because he built a business off his haters. He talks about sweeping negativity away with the “broom of doom,” and he makes jewelry. He started offering broom necklaces on his web site, and the rest was history. And though we’re peers, I know I would relate to him like I relate to my dad, which is “I’m interested in this stuff, but you’ve got a degree.” I have only been a preacher’s kid, and Nathan is ordained in the Orthodox church.
However, I do not have to be ordained because I do not want to pastor a church. I do not want to be the head of the community, just in the middle where I can enjoy everyone else and not have to worry about the direction the church is taking because I do not even want to be paid to care. I worry enough about the global church without the responsibility of a local congregation.
I think that I have done something Father Nathan has also done, which is to lay out my thoughts on theology on social media (he uses Facebook, I use WordPress) because I think they are important culturally. I am trying to give you a picture in your mind that CLEARLY says “Christian” and yet doesn’t reflect any of the views espoused by evangelicals who have never read a day of Biblical criticism in their whole lives.
In fact, I own more biblical criticism than most literalists will ever bother reading. That’s because for them, the one book is enough. It’s not necessary to understand those people’s current events, etc. A Baptist will never understand that Jesus was executed for being a loudmouth zealot. His ideas were dangerous to Rome, and the Sanhedrin agreed with them because they thought he was a loudmouth zealot way before they did. Judaism did not want to try anything new and different any more than Rome did. The fact that Romans are so crazy about Jesus now is straight up ridiculous. Nothing Jesus ever said to or about the Romans was valuable until after he died.
Tough room.
We often throw away the genius in our midst, but I don’t know why people who preach love and tolerance are often victims of the worst violence. We seem to murder and regret a lot. In America, it is worse in terms of gun culture, but the Romans were able to murder Jesus very effectively without one.
Governments kill people all the time, but crucifixion is particularly sadistic. Not only did the Romans crucify him, they nailed a sign to the top of the cross mocking him, and the sign was a snarky “King of the Jews.” You know, because being crucified in public just isn’t embarrassing enough. People could come by and mock him in schadenfreude, With crucifixion, the punishment wasn’t death. It was that you didn’t die right away. You slowly suffocated in front of your family, friends, and strangers. While naked if the little piece of cloth fell off.
We as a world have not changed. I do not know what their practice is currently, but the reason we allowed Trigon, our Russian asset, an L pill (cyanide) is because the rumor was that in Russia, if you were caught spying for the US, they would put you in a crematorium feet first. Trigon asked, and we granted, his ability to take his own life before he was tortured. This is not ancient history. Trigon was caught the year I was born.
The L pill was hidden in his pen, so he offered to write out a full confession. They look on in confusion as he bites down on the pen and dies before he hits the floor, saving him emotional trauma and physical dignity, even post-mortem.
It is a different mindset to kill someone than to stand around and watch them suffer. For instance, if I ever did anything that put me on death row, I would not want a viewing gallery. I’d just sneak in one of my ordained friends under the clergy rule and pass quietly, without the feeling that I was being watched like an animal in a zoo……… A feeling that Jesus would most certainly know intimately.
These are the things I want my community to focus on…. That Jesus’s story is tragic and uplifting because of who he was as a person, not who he became post-mortem, post-resurrection, etc.. In the United States, the prevailing message is the opposite, that you are “washed in the blood.” Everything Jesus did while he was alive takes a back seat to the idea that Jesus is magic.
He absolutely is, but his magic comes from the smallest piece of his soul, the son of a carpenter……. The place where no one looks.
What’s a job you would like to do for just one day?
Even if I could do anything in the world for a day, it still only says “job.” So, to me that means I have eight hours to do whatever I want. I don’t want to do anything in child care, cooking, IT, or writing. I’ve already done those- and I have been told by both kids and their parents that I’m a great babysitter. I turn into my mother. What’s not to like? She was a magician with kids, never losing touch with what would motivate them or make them laugh. I’m glad I inherited those things, but I would not like to be a parent. I like working with children and coming home to my sensory-deprived house. I am not saying that I wouldn’t parent a child if my partner needed that from me. I am saying that I do not seek out relationships with children, they just fall into my lap. They are HUGE bonus prizes, because even if I’m dating their mother/father, adults are boring and we know it. I’m always going to have time for a tea party.
The funniest thing is that I identify SO MUCH with girldad memes, because since I wear boys’ clothing, pink nail polish and the like would look equally ridiculous and I’m here for it. I would love if my partner’s kids shared my interests, but if they didn’t, Barbie Dream House here we come.
Having been raised by a teacher, this also falls under child care and not because teaching isn’t the hardest job in the entire world. It takes a highly specialized mind to be able to think like an adult and translate it into child all day long. It’s not the work itself I object to, but that exhaustion in trying to make sure your words are kid-appropriate. I would be your kids’ favorite history teacher if people thought letting Anthony Bourdain teach their eighth graders was a good idea. Hey, maybe that is a good idea. Call me (if my phone blows up, there’s a lot more wrong with this country than I thought previously).
Here’s a trick my mom had up her sleeve. She had one kid, Dexter, that was giving her issues and she knew that he was making fun of her because she couldn’t speak Spanish. He would pretend not to know English and continue doing right on what she was doing. So, she hired a ringer for the day.
My mother starts teaching and Dexter starts his bullshit and all of a sudden in as deep a voice as I’ve got comes “SIENTATE, POR FAVOR!” Even when I was angry, I remembered to say “please.” So, it takes two words to realize Mrs. Baker isn’t playing anymore, and those words were from me- SIT DOWN. I fixed my mother’s problem for her, but it wouldn’t have been my idea to get me to do it. Having a daughter that spoke Spanish was just a tool in her toolbox and she wasn’t afraid to retrieve it.
Speaking of Spanish, that opens up something I really would like to do for a day. I’d love to be a translator. I’m not fluent in anything besides English, and some would argue that I still have lots of work to do there as well. It doesn’t have to be in Spanish. I assume that if I can do anything I want for eight hours, I will also be given the ability to pick up the language skills needed to do the job. It would be quite a kick to be fluent in Russian/Ukrainian, or Arabic and Hebrew. If my job was simple translation, I would still want to matter to history. Those are the languages we’re hearing about in the news the most often.
I talk a lot about intelligence, but because I’m a writer, I would do better at State. I would be getting the public version of all that intelligence and actually be able to discuss it, vs trying to collect the data in the shadows. I don’t like drowning in information I can’t use. There’s no way to air it out. There’s no way to get light to it. Pieces of yourself slowly suffocate.
So, I’ve narrowed it down to being a translator at State. And now I’ve arrived at my answer. I do not believe that the Secretary of State has language skills in every region. So, I’d like to be a translator for them when something really hot was popping. I wouldn’t do anything more than I am doing right now….. Which is trying to describe the rooms I’m in. They’d just be different rooms than the ones I inhabit now.
But if you know anything about Washington, it’s that those jobs are probably reserved for teenagers because the entire city would shut down if everyone in the government from ages 18-23 decided they were over it. Lindsay just laughed. She’s 1800 miles away, and I still know that she laughed (she worked on Congressional races at that age). If I really, really wanted to be a translator at State, I’ve missed my window. But we are suspending disbelief, so that hopefully I will be in the room when peace in the Middle East is achieved…. Or Ukraine keeps their independence….. I do not have delusions of grandeur in terms of making money. I just want my job to be historically significant.
I think that’s what you learn about working in Washington, to be honest. There has to be glory outside of money, otherwise it’s just bilking taxpayers. Spies, diplomats, the military, everybody works on the same pay scale. When you are talking about money and espionage, we do pay our assets quite a bit for their help.
As Jonna Mendez has pointed out, Adolf Tolkachev was known as the billion dollar spy, as in, we didn’t pay him a billion dollars, but that’s how much he saved American taxpayers. So, we paid him handsomely and he was executed before he had any time to spend it. But, the case officer who gave him money was a regular GS like everyone else.
To me, there is also no solo glory. It takes a team of people to get everything done. I do not need to be a hero. I am perfectly happy to be recognized as “et al.” It’s more important for me to know that I participated than to receive recognition for it.
I would like to be able to say that I was writing history, but thanks to all of you, I already am.
Things have been crazy since Bryn and Dave have been here, and it’s hard to reflect a moment while it’s happening. You may not hear about all the things we did for months, because what tends to happen is that I do something, and then as time passes, the words to be able to describe what happened previously will come to me. Some memories have to rise above the facts to make good writing. I am not talking about “enhancing” a memory. It’s just that it’s hard to describe feelings without much time to even know what they are.
It also depends on how I’m prompted. A lot of the things you learn in this web site are about me because a question (from a prompt, a reader, etc.) will jog a detail that I’d forgotten previously. I have been accused of lying by people saying “that’s not the same story you told last time.” No, it’s not, because it’s a different day and I always have three or four threads running in terms of processing something. Some blog entries are built on one and three. Some entries are built on two and four. But it’s not lying. It’s standing in front of a different part of the elephant.
The view is different when you’re standing at the trunk, but in the next entry, I’ll tell you about the view from the tail. It’s all one day, it’s all one story, but one entry does not cover a whole day. That does not mean if you read both entries, the first one is right and the second one is wrong….. Or vice versa. I am not trying to change a story, but to add additional details that my ADHD brain forgot to include the last time around. I can think in four strands at a time, but I can only write one of them down. That does not invalidate my other thoughts, or make them lies.
I have had to explain this many times, which I have the words for as an adult. I did not have the words for it in first grade, and I was in trouble for lying a lot of the time. Meanwhile, it’s akin to a game I played at the Spy Museum yesterday.
You had 10 seconds to memorize a photo and jot down the relevant details. So, I see that the exhibit is about the Culpeper Ring and the OG Spymaster (George Washington). So, I am trying to record all the details and think, “what’s the pertinent information here?” So, I figured the relevant details would be that there are 25 muskets and 10 cannons headed to Yorktown.
I am so proud of myself. I got the relevant details.
I was questioned over it and I was so fucking confident.
“What color was the pen?”
I failed miserably. But on that one, I got it wrong because I hit the incorrect button with my elbow.
I am probably overthinking this, but I am betting that weapons movement is more important than pen color, but I cannot assume that because I do not know the objective of the mission. My job was to memorize the picture, not to know why they needed the information.
The pen was white, by the way.
But that’s how CIA works. In effect, everyone has a tiny role to play and they all add up to a massive organization. As Jonna Mendez points out, you really don’t even know what operation you’re a part of all the time in terms of major historical events because you’re not read in high enough to see the big picture. You just have to trust that you’re working for the greater good.
I step out on that ledge a lot, because I’m an American. I can criticize CIA every single day all day long and no one is going to lock me up. That lets me love them even more because in a country with a government like China’s, painting their intelligence service’s portrait with more than one color would land me in prison……. Especially if they thought I was painting my feelings as fact.
(“Painting my feelings as fact” is the most beautiful thing anyone has ever said to me in the history of anything, and Supergrover said it when she was angry. The reason it’s gorgeous is that I can’t think of a blog entry in which I didn’t think about using it. That phrase is ridden hard and put up wet around here because I can’t write anything better.)
My point, and I do have one, is that I can tell The Agency to fuck all the way off because of the negative things they’ve done over the years, AND they can be the paramilitary heroes we need- the only friends you’ve got when you’ve traveled and pissed off Putin instead of Biden. I would rather take my chances with Biden, because he might think I was irritating, but there is exactly Jack or shit he can do about it. If they put you in jail for being annoying, I promise I would already be locked up.
CIA is responsible for a lot of bad in the world, but my favorite character in the Marvel universe is Everett Ross (Martin Freeman, the Tolkien case officer in Black Panther). I cannot paint them with one color, because they’ve been adding different hues since 1947. It is important to me not to love them like a child, where everything mommy and daddy do is GREAT! I love them like an adult. I acknowledge the bad and the good. My first priority in intelligence has to be loving my agency because it’s my country, like rooting for DC United instead of the Portland Timbers……… But not at the exclusion of my international friends, whose experiences with CIA might not be as kind as mine. I also get the impression from John Le Carre that I can hate CIA all I want and I’ll still never hate it as much as the people who work there (that was a joke).
If my government is going to allow my intelligence agency (which I personalize because of taxes) to do stupid shit, I like that my government won’t throw me in jail for saying they just did something really stupid. This is always brought home to me by a trip to the museum, and we wandered around for a couple of hours last evening.
Because I’m such a Mendez fan, I went to the Canadian Caper and stopped to “talk” to Tony. I look at his pictures and notes and we have conversations in my head. All the things I would have asked him, etc. I told him that Jonna was AMAZING at her book talk and with the way my insides glowed, it was like he responded. I just figured he’d like to know how she’s doing from an outsider’s perspective. 😉
The museum is not personal to me because of my special interest now. Now, it’s personal to me because I know someone who helped found it. And, of course, because she’s my friend, I want the museum to succeed and sell her books all the time. Seriously. Several times people have asked me for recommendations because I look like I know my way around the book section, and for me, their book section has like seven books tops (that is also a joke- there are MANY intelligence authors I admire, I just don’t know their backstories well, if at all).
I wanted Zac to like the museum because he works in intelligence. I wanted to know whether he thought it was truly representative, what Intel wants people to know about them, etc. He did like the museum, and did love the “artifacts,” which made me feel good. I kind of think of it as his museum, too.
I always like to get a little something at the gift shop because the museum always needs money (they’re not a Smithsonian). This time, it was a small tin with the museum logo that says “DocuMINTS.” I didn’t buy it for the candy, I like the tin for odds and ends because it’s small enough to fit in my pocket and it looks too cool for me.
I am LOVING the retro collection they have now. I’ve already gotten the long sleeved t-shirt, but they’ve also added a hoodie that says “International Spy Museum” in the 1970’s font they used in Argo. As I was telling Zac, I love that the movie starts out like a 1979 movie. I love it because it just looks cool, but it’s also an inside nod to the movie for me.
Lord, I do love a font.
Also, hats off to the casting director on “Argo.” When Zac and I were standing in front of the exhibit, the cast photo and the real photo are nearly identical- to the point that it’s spooky. You really have to get close to tell the difference between Bob Anders and Tate Donovan.
Tate Donovan has been one of my favorite actors since “Space Camp.”
Which is probably why I bought some freeze-dried Skittles in the gift shop as well. Zac loves new and interesting candy, so I gave them to him for his sweets and snacks cabinet. It’s my favorite “room” in the house. 😉
What do space candy and CIA have in common?
Think seriously how we would have gotten to the moon before Russia without them.
It’s a large set of facts I’m painting with my feelings.
List the people you admire and look to for advice…
This is the first time anyone has ever asked me this question and I thought to put myself on the list. I have never been comfortable enough before in my own skin to think my opinion was worth anything. However, once I sat with my thoughts day in and day out, my discomfort at sharing those opinions went away. Mostly because I realized that no one is wrong or right. We are all making it up as we go along. I didn’t have to put people I admired on a pedestal because my opinions were just as good as theirs. It wasn’t hero worship. It was thinking something was wrong with me and that made them automatically better at opinions.
It is also true that when you’re physically disabled and mentally ill, other people assume they’re better with the thinking because they don’t have those issues. It is amazing to me that people think treated bipolar disorder and untreated are the same. So, you have a lot of people who tell you that your opinions aren’t worth anything because to them they aren’t. They have invalidated you by your diagnosis. People tend to be dismissive because they don’t think I’m in my right mind anyway. I don’t know what I’m saying.
In a very real sense, this is true. Accurate and dead on. I do not know what I am saying.
This is because I know exactly what I am saying, but through my autism and ADHD, I do not know what you hear when I talk. I know this because of the difference in what I mean vs. what people have angrily insisted I mean. This is because their brains process the order of my words differently than I do, which changes the meaning of a sentence.
What could possibly go wrong?
It leads people to put emotion where it doesn’t belong, because they’re, in effect, accenting the wrong syllable. Thinking I’m being aggressive, sarcastic, cold, whatever the emotion and telling me that- which is great. I need to know your experience of me. The problem comes in when there is no way to prove to you that I mean what I say and I say what I mean, so I am struggling against the way you perceived my words and not what they actually were. For instance, trying to prove I wasn’t trying to be aggressive when you are absolutely convinced I purposefully tried to anger you.
There is really no way to un-fuck that particular situation. I walk away from those relationships because the thing that’s harder than anything else in a relationship is proving you’re NOT angry. With autism, disproving any negative, really. It’s hard to prove you’re NOT anything if someone’s perception in their minds of you is certain.
Through being autistic, I have learned that I am a master manipulator while I sit there and wonder why people say that….. Or I did, until I learned I was autistic. That everything I say is probably going to come out wrong. So, I’m in a situation where people think I’m manipulating them and it’s supported by the fact that I’m bipolar.
I am not malicious and I am not mentally ill. I take medication every day for it. You don’t call someone blind when you can see the glasses on their face- their vision is corrected. You don’t treat a mentally ill person like they’re on thin ice for being put away.
You don’t focus on the fact that someone is an alcoholic. You focus on the fact that they’re in recovery.
So, if I know I’m not malicious and that I’m not trying to manipulate people, then obviously I am failing in my communication and need to learn new strategies for saying the same things. This is because I do not have a problem voicing needs anymore, but I don’t know how to talk at all without people telling me that I’m acting like I know everything.
However, it’s only a certain group of my friends that jump on me this way, so how they communicate plays into it as well. It is not a one sided communication issue. Because they have things in common, my pattern recognition on what they’re doing reads universal rather than personal to each individual relationship.
So, not only do I need better communication overall, I specifically need guidance on how to phrase things so that I don’t sound like I’m master of the universe. My self-esteem is so incredibly low (and I’m vulnerable about it) that I’m surprised people think I sit around and think about how great I am.
Coming into my own was hearing the child inside me say, “hey. You’re not THAT bad.” My trouble with communication made me reticent to give an opinion at all, because it always came out wrong. I have been told that the most fucking irritating thing about me in the whole entire goddamn world is that I’m always right, so take that for what you will.
One of the reasons I shut down and became a writer, basically talking to myself for incredibly long periods of time is that it came across like people tolerated me rather than genuinely wanting to be in my company. I jumped into writing because I wasn’t wanted elsewhere, and not in a “poor me” kind of way. It was “I don’t have to have friends, because I can entertain myself.”I do indeed have friends, I’m just saying that my happiness is dependent on them. I have the capability to bring myself joy; no one is responsible for making me happy.
I also think that writing reinforces what I think- I am not arguing with myself over how I feel in person because I’ve already written about it here. Therefore, people are deathly intimidated by me because I am deft in an arena where few people excel. My Achilles Heel is that I often have communication issues and end up beating the wrong dead horse instead of the right one…….. Because I interpreted someone else’s words putting the accent on the wrong syllable.
There are plenty of people that I look to for advice, generally my sister and Bryn are at the top of the list.
I ask Supergrover for advice all the time. It’s just that her responses are calculated on everything she’s already said. It’s the same way with Dana. I can’t go back in time, but their uploaded consciousnesses live in me. I talk to their characters. Their characters don’t grow and change, but it’s comforting nonetheless.
I am coming to rely more and more on myself because I realize that being disabled and autistic has led me to discount my opinions, buying into the view everyone else has about both groups. I realized when I was talking about people I go to for advice, it felt like I wasn’t even allowing myself to sit in the conference room with them.
I started taking up more space when I realized I wanted to define myself. That it was okay to take up room. It was okay if I didn’t swallow other people’s opinions whole in order to please them.
I’m not the expert. I constantly play tapes in my head of the things people have said about/to me and it sits in my brain like a rock. I defined myself by all the negative things that people placed on me, and thought I was a bad person because of it. I don’t mean recently. I mean I can tell you about feeling the exact same way at six years old. School is brutal for kids who can’t communicate. Having a neurotypical kindergarten teacher was the first time I realized that people couldn’t hear what I was saying and were putting meanings into my mouth.
I started releasing my demons as a writer…… Or at least, as I said the other day, exercising them. I hardly ever say “exercise” because I know they ain’t leavin.’ It makes me laugh to think of my demons in workout clothes. We are very serious. We are eating Starburst for breakfast.
Breakfast of champions.
I do not know what it is about the autistic brain that makes me insufferable. It’s funny because it’s true. But know that it’s not all me. Part of it is that I have a disability you know nothing about, and are choosing to believe I am not that different from you. The fault in this is not being able to predict my behavior and thinking you can because your heuristics are for neurotypical people.
I am taking responsibility for learning my half, but I can only meet you. I cannot go all the way to the other side and drag you to the middle. It is a disability. Worrying that I’m failing is a non-issue because it doesn’t matter. There’s no chance of winning. It’s miserable when that reality sets in.
I have found that I need respect for myself because I am so misunderstood. I am also not saying I’m not part of the problem. I haven’t known I was autistic since I was a kid, so I have to learn new coping mechanisms.
I think the thing that hurt me the most this week was a scene from “The Big Bang Theory” in panels as a meme on Facebook. It’s Amy telling Sheldon that his friends all hate his bad behavior and that the fact that he can’t do anything about it is the only reason they tolerate him.
I cannot be dependent on external validation. I write or pray. It’s a new development, but trusting in myself hasn’t backfired.
I realized it was almost midnight and I didn’t want to break my streak again. Things are going great. I have the seal of approval from Dave- “you’re cool as shit, dude.” I will have so much more to say when it’s not five til. I’m just too proud to start over. I post every day now.
Stories That Are All True 