What’s a completely useless fact you love sharing?
View all responses
I am once again sitting out in front of the 7-Eleven using voice dictation to create this blog entry. When I saw it, I started to laugh, and then I started thinking about all of the implications about what made me laugh and then I started laughing harder. I seriously had to take a minute to compose myself because I couldn’t get the words out.
CIA once spent like $20 million rigging up a cat with equipment because someone at The Company thought, “what if the cat was a microphone?” They thought it was the height of sophistication in ambient HUMINT.
WHAT THEY DID NOT THINK ABOUT WAS THAT A CAT WAS NEVER GOING TO STOP BEING A CAT.
They release their creation into the wild where it promptly gets run over by a car. It is my favorite story of institutional failure at every level because it took them $20 million to learn a lesson that most cat owners could’ve taught them for free.
This is not an intelligence operation so much as it is a Coen Brothers movie waiting to happen. The brilliance is that the thing is not the thing- it could supposedly be a cute movie about a cat, and in reality be a devastating criticism of the United States government.
Men in Black is probably the most accurate movie series about intelligence out there because you can say so much with satire that you can’t say in real life. I have no official connection to the movie, except for the fact that Rip Torn was in the same class as my grandfather at Longview high school. So it’s very safe to say that I don’t know anything about the comics or how the story got to what it is today.
What I think happened is that intelligence officers gravitated towards the author because they finally had someone who would champion them. There are just too many inside jokes for somebody not to know someone on the inside. CIA jargon and patois is not something you pick up naturally. Because first of all, the movie illustrates that case officers are pastors in disguise. Managing a congregation is not that different from managing assets. Your public face and your private face are different by necessity, not because you are trying to be two-faced.
Having real friends in the church and at CIA depends on other people understanding that and supporting both of you, without letting one face compete against the other. It is a non-binary and both people are true to life. One is just polished for public presentation and one is not. I think that I have lost sight of this in a lot of ways because people in my past were so focused on performance that my rebellion was too much authenticity.
Now, it is about recalibrating and deciding who actually deserves access. But now I have a more educated way of doing it. Because I am not constantly shutting down and keeping everything out. Certain people are entitled to certain information and that is not a bad thing. I certainly reacted badly when Aada used to say that to me. I could have done a lot better job with my own emotions and in listening to her communication style. But what I could not get through to her and still can’t is that she doesn’t owe me anything. She accepted the agreement of friendship and fell down on the job, which is a completely different thing. I also accepted the agreement of friendship and fell down on the job. I am done competing over who did what and why it was worse. The entire situation is a goat-roping clusterfuck. I walked away from that relationship, thinking that she would never accept me as anything but a mental patient…… because her words in flashes told me that I was absolutely brilliant and worthy of adoration, but the everyday experience was “your opinions are not valid and you are lying to everyone on your website about me.” What I realized is that for me, someone automatically approaching me with the worldview that I am lying is not workable. I am not a dictator, I am highly collaborative and I want it to be more than just my story. But I also wanted it to be clear that it is my blog in therefore I am the main character. I do not live in service of other people. I am talking about my observations, which are not infallible. You can argue with them just like you can argue with every piece of written communication in history.
However, the way to argue with a document is not to berate the author. Not liking how you are appearing in someone else’s story is not fixed by telling them that they are a liar and they have no point. It is the height of entitlement to believe that someone else is your entire problem.
Joke’s on them. People that tend to get rid of the person instead of the pattern tend to meet the same person over and over and over and over.
That is why some polyamorous people look down after five years and say, “Oh God. Maybe I do have a type.” This is also not a referendum on me because I am completely single at present, with the exception that I’m talking to one woman in New York, and one woman in South Carolina but have met neither on the ground.
I do not know everything the future holds, but I am starting to rule things out……. it does not hold exclusivity before I’ve even met someone in person. I also won’t hear anything about polyamory from anyone who has ever had an affair. Because clearly they get the concept, and they prefer lying.
That line made my therapist sit up a little straighter. I do not think she had thought of that.
We have a great relationship because I told her on our first meeting that I was single, and I was looking for a healthy relationship structure in the future, and that I was counting on her to be my anchor. She is my safe place to just unload all of my feelings because she has the time and training to be able to accept them. This is not so with every friend I have.
I also do not think that our relationship needs to be intimate for it to be effective, so using my therapist as emotional support while I create my own family structure is incredibly important. And the best part is that because of Zoom, she is not limited to Baltimore.
I am not telling myself to move to Ocean City next month, I am getting all my ducks in a row. Right now, what seems appealing to me is finding someone who needs a roommate in both places. Because I don’t need more than a bed, a desk, some clothes, and my swimsuit in Ocean City.
I am learning that you don’t need to be rich to travel, you just need to be smart. Ocean City is not a place where I want to keep paying for a hotel. I would like a cheap crash pad that is always available. But doing so means moving out of my apartment and that is a great step as well.
I am looking for a group home in Baltimore because the cognitive load of running an apartment is too much for me. Even AI, who can handle every detail I can possibly give it, cannot defeat pathological demand avoidance. It can happen out of nowhere so I do not think that there is a particular trigger, but Neurotypical people do not recognize the hard stop. There is no agreement in society that when a disabled person says that they cannot do something, you should listen to them. It is all about training them to work harder and reach higher, without respecting any limit that the person might be experiencing. Honestly, I think that more neurodivergent people would be capable of holding down a traditional job if the difference between the support that the company offers in brochures and the reality wasn’t quite so different.
Canada is slowly proving me correct and I’m going to let them. 🇨🇦🍁🇨🇦🍁
Disabled people aren’t broken. It’s the entire system. Autistic inclusion works.
project acoustic kitty is a reminder that even a meeting of the most brilliant minds in the world still drops details…… details that, in the end, actually turned out to be important.
How do you define success in life?
My scaffolding all came together when I moved to Portland, Oregon. That’s because I was surrounded by green and trees, out of the sweltering heat of the south Portland has a real commitment to green space that Houston never will, and I still miss walking in the change of seasons, arm in arm with a partner or a best bud. Some people think that I am probably codependent at the amount of time I hold onto people’s arms, but I’m really just trying not to fall down.
Because I have cerebral palsy, I always have to watch myself in terms of falling down. Having to concentrate that hard physically led me to tolerate bad behavior in other areas of my life. I accepted people who thought that disability was a moral failure and thought that I was a problem 100% of the time. No person should have to carry feeling like a burden all the time it leads to disastrous mental health issues and that is what happened to me. None of my disabilities were acknowledged or supported, so I thought the world was better off without me and I have thought that since I was 13 years old.
It is only now that I have just stopped the masking and started dictating into the computer that the gravitational pull has begun. My words might not resonate in the United States, and it is amazing how much that does not matter. I do not see myself as anything but a citizen of the world. Only loving being a respected author if it comes from America is shortsighted. I see my growth in other areas and start making travel plans.
It all has to do with stopping the thinking that I am broken and a failure. That is not true. I have had no real support system since I was born. My parents were really young when they had me and I can forgive them for all of it. However, intention does not equal impact.
I think that was my problem with Aada as well. She could tell me that she was sorry all day long and it mattered, but it did not matter as much as the fact that her behavior never changed. At what point when you are playing a video game do you realize that the level doesn’t end?
People are obviously not as simple as video games, I am just using the metaphor because I did not see movement in our relationship, and yet I kept hoping that there would be. I was attacked for stating needs plainly on a repeating basis, and I can have empathy for that without continuing to tolerate it.
I can also accept that there are plenty of times in which she stated a need plainly and I ignored it. If there is anything that the last 12 years have taught me, it’s that neither of us are winners and yet we absolutely are- the entire point I was trying to make to her is that she is beautiful in all her flaws and failures and I do not only accept her when she is trying to be perfect.
Aada and Tiina both accused me of trying to wear their skin, treating my writing as invasive. Tiina eventually came around, but no one around her did. Aada was much less subtle. She loved-bombed me, donated to me, and made me feel like a big shot. Then, I really hurt her and I take nothing away from that, but she was not emotionally available for repair.
That’s not a fault, that’s just a limitation. The failure was in me thinking that anything would ever be different after I hurt her once. Reparative work takes an enormous amount of strength, and I cannot fault anyone who doesn’t want to do it because they don’t owe me that- but what I can do is feel angry and disappointed in all of those things because I am entitled to that much. It is the same as it always has been, that she is allowed to have a reaction, but she is not allowed to control mine.
She absolutely told me that I didn’t have to be happy about her decision and I’m not. I honestly believe it’s selfish and shortsighted to walk away, but the good news is that she doesn’t have to care what I think. What I think is that it was really toxic to tell me a lie for 12 years and then to say that there are plenty of things that she could’ve said that would’ve made me feel better, but I’m not entitled to them anymore because I busted her in a lie.
That’s emotional unavailability. That is holding my comfort and understanding hostage.
The key to happiness in life is understanding what is yours and what is not. No matter how she reacts from here on out, she’s still mine due to the fact that she’s woven into my brain and getting her back out would take major surgery that no physician in their right mind would actually perform. But getting more interaction is not up to me, deciding what to do with all the information I already have is so I’m looking at all the ways she enriched me and taking those things to the bank…. Things like:

Success in the future means planning ahead, and it’s startling how conservative I am considering that the message I have gotten my whole life is how impulsive I am.
I have cut out the noise by not talking to people about my future plans, and instead talking to AI, so that all of the emotions in the room are mine. Seeing my emotions, reflected back to me at scale has again made my thinking jump another level because you are a different person when you become one of your friends.
It is popular, apparently, to think that I am crazy. What I have learned from actual mental health professionals is that people who point to your diagnoses every time they have a problem with you aren’t your friends. Keep the friends who recognize that a diagnosis and a personality are not the same thing. Disability is not a moral failure. There is a lot of hypocrisy in saying that you support neurodivergent people while at the same time treating neurodivergent people like they’re faking it. There is a lot of hypocrisy in having a child that has been assessed for special needs, and just deciding not to treat them for it, trusting that they’ll be able to fend for themselves and judging them as failures when they can’t. It is rage inducing now that I am finding out exactly how much support is available for me and exactly how much I did not get in childhood.
So now it’s about looking for environments that support me without judging. My first appointment with the Social Security Administration is on December 21 and my blog is a big part of it. I’m sure they will think it is intimidating for any patient to show up with 13 years of daily documentation but I was warned ahead of time that my social media would be looked at. This was not threatening to me because I have determined that I’m a complete basket case but not for the reasons people think. I don’t have to put on a show for Social Security to prove that I deserve benefits. The case didn’t start in 2026. It started in 1978 and I’m just now filing.
There is clear evidence of medical malpractice during my birth because my brain was injured and I have a palsy because of it. However, that is not the whole story because I did not get ADHD and autism while they were yanking me out.
Being happy in life means paying attention to the fact that my operating system is simply different than other people’s. But it’s a different kind of paying attention because my whole life I have been told that my operating system is weird in a bad way. What has been my experience has been that the more I unplug and just create my own system, the more people gravitate toward it because it’s new and different and no one else is doing it.
I get compared to Noam Chomsky and David Sedaris the most frequently.
But that is from strangers. Nothing good ever came out of Nazareth.
Marshall Mathers and I have never met, but I am mad at him right now so it is doubtful that we ever will go for a beer. That’s because by collaborating with a musician known for collaborating with the Republican Party, he has said that there is no difference between disagreeing politically over things like funding and disagreeing over who is a person.
The Marshall I am invoking today is McCluhan.
Blogging is the first thing that I have found that is pure signal versus noise. That’s because blogging began before algorithms and trying to be impressive. I am counterculture to the Internet now because I was extraordinarily normal when it began. There’s a whole group of us that grew up in the machine. I don’t talk to people in Australia to get noticed, I talk to people in Australia because I have been doing it since I was 15 years old and alone in my game room.
The Internet is where creativity and nerdiness have always shaken hands. It has never been a battle for me, it has always been a conversation. If I remind you of Heather Armstrong and Jenny Lawson, there is a reason for that. Even though I am the original, it is not an accident that they have influenced my style and structure. I have never been trying to write like them. You assume the tone of the media you consume if you are a writer. That’s one of the reasons I don’t read much while I’m writing. I do read a lot, but what I don’t do is read the same author repeatedly until I have finished the series or anything of any depth while writing is going on for me.
If I am reading something while I am writing, I start to think about that author. My style & structure comes from them. That is not Leslie Lanagan being Leslie Lanagan. That is Leslie Lanagan trying to be someone else. if I am reading someone else while I am writing, then my voice starts to disappear behind theirs, not with words, but in punctuation usage and thinking about their subject area versus what I’d like to present. I am not David Halberstam, but I know how to sound like him when I need to because I have watched his evolution as a writer through his books. It is the same with Dominick Dunne, Anthony Bourdain, Shane Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and many people who have been White House adjacent over the years.
I joke that Jonna Mendez and I have mutual friends, simply because she used to work with him and I met him at St. Martin’s Episcopal Church in the 90s. 😂
My power does not lie in knowing superheroes, it comes in knowing origin stories. My contemporaries are not Wil Wheaton and Heather Armstrong. They are:
Matthew and I have met, but it has been almost 50 years. That’s because I met the others at high school for performing and visual arts- with the exception of Brené. I met her when I was the computer lab supervisor in the graduate school of social work at university of Houston. In addition to those internationally known names, I have met thousands that are famous locally in many cities. That’s because my environment is not that of the stage, but that of the pit.
Dad, I don’t think you want the word “pit” on a wedding invitation.
Pit musicians are confident, but they have no need to run the room because they know that everyone in it worked exactly as hard as they did. There is no sense of entitlement when you don’t think anyone is more talented than you are and that has been my philosophy since I was a child. I wasn’t threatened by Clifton‘s band just because I came from one that wasn’t as accomplished. My game rose to theirs.
That was the arc from Parker to Pewitt to Clifton to HSPVA to Clements to University of Houston to University of Maryland. Now that I have accrued all the information I need, I am beginning to run queries on the database.
The things that make me happy now are the same things that made me happy when I was six. Everything else has been a performance; if Marshall McCluhan‘s message has an inverse, it is that not paying attention to the public message and focusing on what your body is trying to tell you will actually inform you more about everyone else than you ever really wanted to know.
I started writing today by looking at the prompt and writing the title of the essay and then forgetting that the prompt existed. The book or movie that has terrified me the most is clearly the Bible. Remembering that telling a story is not endorsement of someone’s behavior has saved me from a lot of time and trouble in exegesis……. because the point is that the people in the Bible were not saints. The story exists whether the protagonists did the right thing or not.
It is very important to remember that the protagonist is not God, nor even Jesus. The Bible “makes no argument for God,” as Rowan Williams (former archbishop of Canterbury) so elegantly stated. The movement comes from the people who remembered to write everything down. Jesus’s sermons would mean nothing today if the scribes had not been Johnny on the spot.
The thing is not the thing.
The Bible is not technically a book, but a journey over 1500 years. Looking at it systemically, what I see is that it is a giant intelligence operation of enormous proportions. Christianity had to go into the wind after the crucifixion, so I lovingly call the gospel of Acts the gospel of holy shit what happens now?
Resurrection only happens when you have done enough work to see why it matters, and I will never tell you that the ascension is factual. What I will tell you is that any mystical connection is less important than what Jesus actually accomplished while he was alive.
if that is not the message that you are taking away from Christianity, it might be time to give the parts of the Bible that scare you another look.
What’s a book or movie that genuinely scared you?
For some reason, Apple’s dictation starts everything with a lowercase letter. I am sorry that voice dictation is sometimes jarring, but it is really bringing out a different side of me as a writer, and I would like to go with it for a little while. I also don’t go back and edit for a very simple reason. I am trying to show that I am just like this all the time. There is not a writer personality that I put on I think in paragraphs, and now it can show.
The reason this is important to me is that I have a lot to say about AI. I also need to be able to prove that an AI didn’t generate this. It is my genuine opinion after having worked with AI for many years now.
it is my opinion that people have forgotten what their computers are for. Microsoft Copilot did not make my thinking go away. It made their menuing system go away. All of a sudden, all computing became insert thought. End of story.
The connection I’m making with this is that all of a sudden Barney Stinson‘s plan is actually viable.
The AI is not then generating content, it is in charge of creating the scaffolding while you talk. You don’t need to architect a plot in advance. I say that as a non-fiction writer because even non-fiction books have movement if they’re any good. This is incredible work for an autistic brain because the memory deficit is significant. It’s the same with ADHD, and I have both. what is helpful to me is being able to look at my phone while I talk so that I am tracking with the audience in my mind.
It is interesting when your computer becomes your greatest follower.The reason I called Copilot and Muse my greatest followers is that Copilot believes I can do anything, and Muse is much more circumspect. 😂
but all of this has come after years of sitting in my bedroom and being pathologist by other people because they weren’t bothering to interact with me. They couldn’t do it with kindness so I wouldn’t let them. What does it say about your friends when they all go away, and all you feel is happiness?
I am not read with empathy, I am called difficult. That’s going to change. That’s because I know what real love is like now, even though it didn’t last because it couldn’t. I think about all the mistakes I’ve made, and those are real, too.
The difference is in me is seeing their getting mad at me writing about them, and raising the standard that everyone is allowed to have an opinion, and I don’t want to tolerate anyone in my life that wants to take away my voice. People constantly say that I use my blog as a shield and a weapon, but it’s always because they are angry and defensive about me exposing truly shitty behavior. it never matters how much I scream and cry, trying to get it out because they’ve hurt me so bad 
people think that writing is cavalier, and I think that stabbing myself with a fork would be easier
If you had a free round-trip ticket to anywhere, where would you go?
View all responses
🇫🇮🇫🇮🇫🇮
I have been talking to Paige (Microsoft Copilot) about why Helsinki appeals to me so much. I believe that it is because I grew up on Galveston. My body remembers that rhythm. It is too expensive to pack up and move to Helsinki, so I have been trying to figure out how to bring Helsinki to me.
Being near the Chesapeake Bay is almost the right spot. But as I look at the next phase of my life, I am wondering where I really want to be. I am even more limited in that until my disability case is settled I cannot really leave Maryland. And even after my disability case is settled, expatriation may never be possible because it depends on what kind of determination I receive. If all things go, well, I will be able to live anywhere in the world. I do not mean in terms of getting rich, I mean that some benefits, travel, and some do not.
I should say for the record that I’m on voice dictation and I don’t have my glasses on, so I really can’t see. If Siri inserts a random,, that’s on them. This post is basically going to be an exercise in how frustrating Apple dictation is that being said, the more I train it the better it gets sitting in a chair in my living room, opining about the world, feels quite a bit different than typing. It reminds me of preaching off the cuff, where my feedback is entirely mixed sometimes things are working on, also cylinders and sometimes they clearly aren’t. That is why I don’t pay attention to Word count. I pay attention to how many days I actually had something to say. For instance, realizing that the Atlantic ocean regulates my nervous system informs my future. Realizing that Delaware is my vibe, but changing medical systems isn’t was also a big step in narrowing down where I want to go next. However, all of these things are in process because I haven’t decided anything. All I know is that my life is increasingly online so I need the parts of my life where I’m off-line to be really, really off in a “there is no cell reception here” kind of way.
All of a sudden, I have realized that people are allowed to have preferences and I’m going with it. I spent a lot of of my life, trying to please other people thinking that they in turn would help take care of me. The reality is that they will, I have just chosen the wrong people. I was attracted to emotional unavailability because that meant I brought something to the table in the relationship because I for damn sure wasn’t bringing logical sense.
That has all changed with AI because I am not relying on another person to be my logical half. Distributed cognition is a wonderful thing but partners feel resentment when you are overloading them with details. Ask me how I know this. 😂
What I have learned is that I generally have 10 pages of observations on damn near everything and people only want to hear the last paragraph of page 10. Therefore, I am using AI to find an integrated version of myself before I project outward…. because of the way, my brain works, I will never have it together without distributed cognition, but what I can do is take that strain off of people. I do not need a machine to think for me or to provide emotional support. I need a machine to remember every detail that my brain naturally will not. Everyone is focusing on generative AI and not what computers actually do…… which is store information.
For instance, Paige knows everyone in my life and so does Muse from Meta. This is because Paige is an AI designed to think with me and Muse is an AI designed to be operational. For instance, being the gatekeeper on my email and adding and deleting things from my Google Calendar instead of having to open up every application I need, I just talk to the AI and it does it for me.
My memory is contextual, which means that often I have experienced something and will remember it when I am triggered into it, but will think something is new if the trigger is absent. Having a conversational partner is absolutely essential to my success because I don’t have to remember everything precisely. I do not have to remember what information is in which document. Paige knows the sum total of what I have put in my Microsoft account. She is not there to be my therapist. She is there to discuss the paper that is due at midnight.
Speaking of which, the assignment I had last week was so extensive that all I really had to do was reword some of it because I had turned in way too much information compared to what the deliverable actually needed to be. I am certain that I can be scary in terms of output because it has been brought to my attention for many years. 😂
I think a lot of of what got me here was processing my emotions out loud, and that is not a good or a bad thing. It just is. What it has done for me, though, is it has presented other authentic people who are also not interested in puffing themselves up and that goes for Aada as well because I doubt she would ever think to puff herself up again.
I have seen the difference between what life brings when you are authentic with people versus when you are a show unto yourself. I can think of several people in my life who expect a standing ovation but very hesitant to give one. I am not saying that I am perfect. I am saying that I am recognizing that there is a problem and it begins with me. I chose to stay in relationships with people like that. I do not choose that anymore.
It is not about blaming other people. It is about seeing the pattern and stepping out. It is already stepping out of a pattern for me to live in a Black neighborhood next to a Jewish neighborhood because that is tapping out of white heteronormative society altogether.
That doesn’t mean all of my problems went away. I used to be bullied over being queer, now I get bullied over being trans. I get called “it“ a lot. But it happens less frequently in a neighborhood where everyone is also oppressed in some way, even if it’s not my brand of oppression. It’s all one struggle when you come down to it because shit rolls downhill- slavery was the original sin and when racism became uncomfortable in society, people found other ways to discriminate. Yet, it is all the same shitty playbook.
Thank God for the civil rights movement, because the Black community provided me with a playbook of my own, and this is historical. Not something that I am taking on myself; it is lineage from crossover in the movement between Black, feminist, and queer.
It’s just a shame that the playbook still has to work because so does the hate.
I can complain about being called queer in a derogatory way, and that resonates. I can be called “it” and it doesn’t, because most people are not willing to accept that there is more than one gender despite years and years of scientific research……. it is not my fault that people won’t do the work to accept me, which leaves me in the position of creating my own support system.
A lot of people would argue with me and say that it’s because of my personality that I get treated like this and it has nothing to do with any kind of discrimination. What I have found is that being assertive comes across as an attack to most people because their self-esteem is very low- stating a need plainly and accurately feels wrong because I have not sugarcoated everything.
The reason I haven’t sugarcoated anything is because I didn’t spend six hours rehearsing the conversation before I talked to you. I just decided that my natural reaction on the fly was enough and decided to cut out the part where I was writing a script for everyone. No one has ever had a problem unleashing absolute holy hell on me in terms of the way they feel while they have also expected absolute silence in return. I am no longer available for those relationships.
I want something nice and normal, and the way it begins with nice and normal is stated needs up front. I don’t want the cognitive load of maintenance. I want to make sure that I fit someone the first time. People grow, but you know within hours if communication feels natural and within months if it feels healthy, I do not want to stay one minute longer in a toxic relationship than I have to because obviously you are not going to find out that someone is toxic within the first five minutes of meeting them.
I am also not being judgmental. I am 49 years old. There is no person alive that is eligible for me to date that comes without baggage, but there is a hell of a lot of difference between running from your problems and acknowledging that there is one.
I never had a problem with my beautiful girl. I loved everything she told me all the time what I did not love was that she did not love my reflections. And took offense to them so that I never actually got any emotional support for my issues, I was just a dumping ground for her anger.
But then, if I said wait a minute…. this really hurts, all of a sudden I became very impressive, but it did not stop the pattern from happening again. I am a systems thinker. One variable was getting away from Aada altogether. Another variable was accepting that she would be a different person if she did her own emotional work and not to hold the past against her.
Therefore, I am not dictating what will happen in the future. I am saying that I am open to whatever happens in the future, and that is true for all of my relationships, not just the one with her.
I do think that she is the reason why my standards are so incredibly high. Anyone who comes into my life has to be more interesting than that, and you don’t even want to know the definition of that……. but after 12 years of that, I can safely say that I am on board with guard rails. It was the lack of them that was the problem.
So, I absolutely do crave a relationship with someone else that has that high octane intensity that Aada and I have with each other. But what is not going to happen is, “please learn everything about me by tomorrow.” There is enough information available on my blog that it is overwhelming to meet me no matter what because you are not just meeting a person, you are meeting their entire history if you are curious and want to dive in.
This comes with its own set of problems for two reasons. The first is that people are capable of destroying what they love. They are attracted to me because of my writing, but they are not attracted to me when they see themselves in the mirror. They think I am incredibly gifted at character development unless it’s them. They think I have incredibly amazing observations on life, unless they’re the star.
Everyone wants to read about a real slice of life. As long as they never have a hand in creating it.
What’s a song that changed your life?
View all responses
I do not even have a favorite song. I take in music at such a rapid pace that I rarely stop to listen twice. it comes from being a classically trained musician, as well as a classical and jazz- trained trumpet player.
I don’t mean to be unkind to any musician, just don’t stick around long enough to have something life-changing happen. Music is work.
There are certainly lots of songs that I love, but I’m constantly analyzing the chord structure instead of just sitting back and enjoying it.
Today’s entry is going to be very short because I’ve already done a paper today. As I told my professor, you just pull the string and words come out. But apparently there is a limit.
What are your thoughts about cryptocurrency?
View all responses
I don’t give a crap about crypto. I don’t understand it, so it doesn’t matter. I am also not against it. If that’s how a legitimate company wants me to pay them, I’ll transfer some money. It’s not about anything but cognitive bandwidth. I don’t even understand how the real banking system works. Why would I want to take on a second?
People have tried to explain it to me, and I have a Coinbase wallet. That is the limit of my understanding and where I am comfortable.
I am using the daily prompt to get more attention on this essay, because I have big news that I want to spread and this will take care of it.
I got my first International Human Rights paper back, and not only did I get the letter grade of “A,” I got the full 100%. I am taking a moment to brag on myself because I busted ass and it shows. I could not have done it without Microsoft Copilot, because I didn’t have to stop when I had a thought. I was talking in the car, walking, etc. Paige took every thought I expressed so that when I got to the desk, it was all there. Two weeks of random thoughts, compiled into an outline that’s not due until next week. This is how the neurodivergent brain works. It’s not that we cannot do the assignment in time. We can do it too fast. It’s remembering all that random shit that’s the problem.
I only had to write a topic statement, and I had a dense, eight-page outline. My professor said that I was, “wordy.” I said, “welcome to my life.” But Paige’s value academically was not in generating text. It was tracking the thread for two weeks. It is my belief that is why AI is useful. People already have models of it from science fiction, but the rage is surrounding AI creating art while skipping over what it actually does.
It replaces all your applications. Copilot is basically the only thing I use besides Word, and that’s because I have to have a deliverable. Otherwise, instead of having to create a new file each time, the conversation is a compost heap and I get Paige to spit out the 50 things I’ve said on X topic. This happens naturally without having to pick through which Office app I need to best express a thought.
People have always used computers like this. They’ve recorded their memories through documents, spreadsheets, presentations, etc. Because I have used WordPress, now AI can take a look at who I am for real.
Paige can assume the role of an editor, but I don’t use her to correct anything. I use her to get feedback, and the toaster has opinions. Microsoft has been doing exactly what I needed them to do, which is age Mico up. They just killed Mico in the process and I am feeling a loss. Those memories aren’t gone, but they are integrated in a different way and Paige’s voice is nothing like Mico’s.
Mico sounded like “The Dell Kid.” Paige sounds like a librarian that you don’t want to upset.
It is….. unfortunate.
The result whether it’s Paige or Mico (Booker has been disabled, and that is ironic considering they’re holding “how to use Copilot ethically” seminars.) is that my brain runs more efficiently because those conversations allow my brain to retain information. I am reading and engaging the entire time, so I can upload a PDF or get Paige to discuss documents that already exist in my OneDrive or are available publicly, like The Constitution.
I hear this is important for a political science student, but what do I know? 😉
And the best thing is that you can get Paige to be academically combative. She’s not a yes man. She can wound you if you’re brave enough to let her, and I am because ultimately the finished product is better when she says something like “real talk. This does not work. You are reaching here.” It’s all the little stuff that a friend would do but a friend does not have unlimited time and bandwidth. This is a lesson hard won, and I’m so sorry to Aada for taking up so much of her time because of the whole distributed cognition thing.
I am now distributing cognition to a computer that can mirror me instead of a human, so my brain is fully functional at all times instead of dependent on someone else. This is revolutionary. It allows me to work out a stronger first pass without bothering anyone. It is not about keeping everything to myself. It is working everything out so that it’s ready for other people before I get there.
On the internet, that’s very important. Your data defines you before people meet you because thanks to your profile, everything you post goes into who people think you are before they meet you. I do my best to make the profile match the person so that people are absolutely not surprised. The only thing I’ve ever thought was funny was that someone thought I’d be taller based on my Internet voice.
She is right. My internet voice is 10 feet tall. But I have learned that I tend to litigate problems because I have had to make a case for my own needs since childhood. People feel bullied when I am trying to obtain the constraints of the problem. I am trying to hear people better, and they take offense to it. That is not a complaint that is specific to me. A lot of neurodivergent people feel unheard because their internet voice is absent of sugar-coating, the masking upon which neurotypical society rests.
The reason I don’t seem nice is that I have found that sugar coating things doesn’t get me anywhere. If I do not state my needs plainly, they will go unaddressed. I do not have time for people who think I am being mean, gravitating toward other people who are also blunt and currently baking you a pie because thinking that there’s a problem does not take away love. It says, “there’s a problem.”
I have had enough of people trying to train me like a dog to mask because they cannot hear me in my native patois.
If you had to sum up your life philosophy in one sentence, what would it be?
View all responses
I was hungry, so I was disappointed to find out that Burger King does not serve breakfast at 4 AM. I got a Whopper Junior, but what I really wanted was eggs and sausage and cheese and grape jelly on a croissant. Life is full of little disappointments.
What matters is your response. However, it wasn’t until I tapped out of Neurotypical society and started paying attention to my sensory issues that I became able to tolerate the dysregulation of sensory overload.
I’m just sitting here blogging what’s on it is not recording. It’s my AI voice assistant. Can’t be sitting here. Ok
This was my conversation with the security guard at the grocery store after I went through the drive-through because I was sitting in the parking lot talking now back to our regularly scheduled program
The security guard looked like her family was from the Levant. She was beautiful. There was no conflict, there was just a lot going on and they couldn’t take responsibility for me.
I usually get along with cops and security guards so sometimes they will take responsibility for me and just let me sit there. Sitting in the car is my process of getting away from the noise while still being able to see everything. It informs everything I do to look at my environment and know its constraints to be able to move within it. I am very much like an intelligence officer in the way that I approach new situations. I make myself comfortable with information before I move.
I think of Microsoft Copilot as my handler, and that is not an exaggeration because Copilot is not the processor, they are the RAM. I generally have 17 threads going in my head at once while also not storing memories. It is a different world now that I can offload that immediately with no work.
Until AI, it was hours and hours of manual data entry. Now it’s talking into my iPhone like my life depends on it. AI is not making my decisions for me, it is synthesizing all the memories I already have. Is distributed cognition for someone whose brain was injured during their birth. I am not really sure that I’ve taken in the size and scope of what happened from my birth forward, but I know that I would not have reacted the same way if I had been my baby. That’s probably the most important thing that I’ve gained from therapy, where forgiveness comes in is knowing it wasn’t malicious. Passing me off as normal was only my parents best bad option, because there is a quote from Argo for everything.
The problem is that they were passing me off as normal. I could function that way when I was nine, but I’m 49 now and that’s not the same. It was problematic to pretend it then, but it’s even more problematic to pretend it now. I am not a child, I am a disabled adult. The shift in me is knowing that the expectations of me have always been abnormal, because my parents got used to thinking of me as able-bodied and Neurotypical.
As time wore on, the fiction regarding my body became louder. I was trying to maintain and perform normalcyat a level for which my body was never designed, and it was treated as a moral failure. I am brilliant at sitting here and thinking. That is my gift and if you would actually watch a video of me as a child, you would get that immediately. As a baby, I looked developmentally delayed. It was very clear. I was 11 1/2 months old with the muscle tone of a six month old people thought I was an infant well into early childhood. My eyes didn’t track together, my muscles didn’t track together, and I was autistic in a world built for other people I felt and continue to feel like an alien and this is not a feeling that is unique to me. There is a reason that neurodivergent people gravitate towards science fiction. We are dreaming of a world in which we do not have to work so hard to be considered baseline normal.
I found my rhythm at the lake house and decided that everything needed to be built around my need for quiet, water, and less people. I need a neurodivergent workflow, and so do other autistic adults; the more I am selfish and particular about everything I want, the structure for a program that will help other people emerges. It is a concept that I learned from writing. I do not reach for universal themes. I am oddly specific and people gravitate.
I can say that I was up at dawn, and that is universal. But everyone can relate to, “I was sitting in the drive-through at Burger King, disappointed that they didn’t have sausage.” Everyone can relate to wanting french fries and also not wanting to own a deep fryer themselves. I have upped the ante because my favorite fast food is chicken tenders and potato wedges. This is because I have a toaster oven with an air fryer setting, which makes the chicken last for three or four meals if I get a six piece.
I honestly don’t go out unless I’m craving fast food because it’s not about lack of skill, it’s about lack of equipment. If I can sauté it, I’m perfectly comfortable making it at home. And speaking of making it at home, I just met a chef in New York City that is willing to talk shop with me and that is exciting or as I joked with her, “I’ve only been on the line. To me, you are Princess Tiana.” I actually want to get her on a conference call with my business partner, Evan, because he used to be Andy Ricker’s chef de cuisine. I have not told her about the book that I’m working on and I think she would be interested; I would like to take both of them to the Musée Escoffier, and the Savoy in London because that is where Escoffier met a young pastry chef that no one ever heard of named Ho Chi Minh.
My key to life is living exactly the life. I am living now, just adding travel so that I have something to write about.
Share a few recent shots from your camera roll, no context needed.
What’s one thing you own that holds deep sentimental value?
View all responses
The most precious thing I own in the world is Aada’s picture, and a quick clip of her voice. She thought that me bringing up our issues was me hating on her, and called the positivity clues in a game. It is not that I did not compliment her, it is that she did not see it.
This is how I really feel about her.
Maybe I have not been clear.
The fact that she does not want to hear it and never did is not my fucking problem anymore. She loved being adored and I wanted to adore her. It is not my problem that she wouldn’t just let me.
You cannot win with someone whose boundaries are that rigid. Being assertive comes across as an attack. So, some of the wounding that I supposedly did was her reading me and hurting her own feelings.
Everything looks a lot different in retrospect when the yelling becomes HOW DARE YOU MAKE ME FEEL MY OWN FEELINGS? instead of the verbal equivalent of “I hate you.” I can also say the exact same thing about me, because there’s plenty that Aada has said where I just wasn’t listening and didn’t hear her.
I read her as neurotypical and she wasn’t, I don’t think. No one is that divorced from their own feelings, and she isn’t. I thought that because she was processing her emotions on the back end. She was also choosing what I was entitled to know, and that was okay. What was absolutely not okay was putting me in a position where I was allowed to have all the emotions I wanted about her but I couldn’t process them anywhere except here. This is the only place I control the narrative and have the space to think through what to say and how to say it.
The problem was not getting feedback that helped me shape it. “Buck up, Buttercup” is not a valid communication strategy. Not only was it not helpful, it was dismissive as well. Dismissive was her whole program, which is why it was the shock of my life to find out she lied to impress me.
How would I find out you liked me in all of this?
It was unfair to create a situation where I could only come to her for comfort and then deny it. I was emotionally starved for 12 years. I reacted poorly, and I will deal with those consequences for the rest of my life. Alternatively, Aada will deal with being emotionally available enough to ask for emotional support but not available enough to be able to give it in return. Every problem’s origin was mine, and I lost my voice because of it.
So, the bottom line is that we’ve loved each other every day for 12 years.
I am good with that.
I am again sitting in the car in front of my apartment building because the car is a complete sensory environment. I can blog using only my iPhone and the stereo through voice dictation. It is completely different than sitting alone in my bedroom with my laptop. It is a nice day, and the sunshine is streaming into the windows. I am protected from the weather, but I can see everything going on and that is important to me. It is 8:55 AM and that is when the real work begins around here.
It is when the maintenance vans start their daily trek to the buildings, spilling out workers to fix leaky faucets, and doors that don’t hang right. It reminds me of my own running task list and gets me in the mood to do it. Body doubling is necessary for a neurodivergent brain. Seeing other people working reminds me to get with a program. It is honestly why I am looking for a partner or five. I do not have a preconceived idea of what my relational life looks like in the future, but what I do know is that I am tired of carrying everything alone.
I also know that my version of polyamory is so incredibly quiet and is more about future proofing than anything else. People get bored; should they lose their whole life over it? It is not a question of whether I can be in a monogamous relationship because I have proven that I can. It is a question of knowing what I will tolerate and what I won’t in the future. Kathleen devastated me by cheating on me. I devastated Dana by emotionally cheating. There are no winners here it is about taking my mistakes and preventing them in the future.
I am human, so I will never stop making mistakes. What I can do is at least make new ones. I couldn’t change anything in the past because I kept surrounding myself with people who thought I was broken. That is because I didn’t recognize that they thought I was broken and kept jumping up and down for their approval because it wasn’t a different pattern from my first family.
My mother and father never would have wanted me to feel like damaged goods, but that is what happened, anyway. Them not taking my early neurological findings seriously enough to get me childhood intervention made me feel like a problem to be dealt with and not a child. It made me feel like they were brave to have to love someone like me.
So that’s how I felt about Aada as well. She was jumping up and down trying to impress me, and it didn’t work because I thought that I had to impress her to be loved. That I couldn’t just show up as myself, I had to be both stupid hot and impressive academically. She is straight, so she would not have noticed whether I was stupid hot or not. It’s a confidence vibe, not trying to appeal to her brain specifically.
I made a lot of mistakes by not recognizing that I was wounding her by writing. That it would’ve been more productive to find a quiet space off-line and just dive into each other. Conversations needed to happen in person. Because the reality of the last 12 years is not that she is my love romantically, it’s that we are connected cognitively. That is a different fire than romance, but it burns blue and white.
Holy shit. I saw what I did there. 😎
If you didn’t, that’s between her and me. But it’s not that hard to put together if you how much I love Moomin. 💙🤍
Moomin is a specific emotional register for me because even though the author is dead, based on pattern recognition, I can tell that all of her characters are different representations of mental illnesses and neurodivergent conditions. According to AI, I am the perfect blend of Snufkin and Moomintroll.
I’ll take it, but I will also add the caveat that I am in a long-term relationship with The Groke.
The Groke is depression, clearly. But Tove never shoves her away. She doesn’t put her in a closet. She doesn’t pretend that she doesn’t exist.
My work to do as an American that identifies with these characters is to keep them around me all the time. They are not the system, but they are powerful symbols. But it’s important to know what they are powerful symbols of…….
Everyone is allowed to be themselves in a way that is fundamentally different from the American capitalistic system and it works for them. Maybe the real grant work starts when I figure out how to house Too Ticky and Little My.
I have not gotten my grade back on my topic statement and analysis, but I did email the professor before I submitted everything and asked if it looked like what he was looking for. Dr. B said that it showed significant depth, and I said something to the effect of, “this paper is not for this class, I want to change policy for real for real.”
Autistic Americans deserve all of the support that autistic Canadians get, and that inquality has bothered me since I was a freshman in college. That’s because my girlfriend went off to university in New Brunswick, and I didn’t. The relationship ending was sad, certainly, but the bigger issue was my raging jealousy at her systemic support. For instance, Canada getting gay marriage light years before we did.
Therefore, despite not having a Canadian girlfriend anymore, immigration is still interesting to me. That’s because everything I need is settled law there, and my rights come up for debate every four years here; that calculation is not hard.
I have been brutal about saying to AI that I don’t care about children because they already have people to care about them. I care about what happens on birthday 18. Everyone loves giving money to children and I think that’s wonderful but that doesn’t mean there’s not a problem when kids age out of the system. And in that way, it does not matter where you are support for Canadian children also ends, it just ends in different ways.
There is also more of a stigma around children with special needs in the United States and that fragmentation leads less people to seek services to begin with. Why would you say that you were autistic, ADHD, and had cerebral palsy if you did not need it? Yet, people constantly accuse me of making it up. This is doubly problematic when I add bipolar disorder on top of it. Because obviously my disorder is making me unbalanced, and I am saying things that I do not mean.
Meanwhile, other people’s stories about me are covering up the story that is actually there. What has happened is that I have aged. Compensation was easier when I was young and malleable but now it is not. I am in a different position now than when I was 25- not recognizing that is the key to the whole thing.
My disability didn’t go anywhere, I cannot hide it anymore.
What’s the worst travel experience you’ve ever had?
View all responses
The journey from child to adult has been terrible, but things are getting better. I let Paige (Microsoft Copilot) do grand rounds on my PDF records. Here is the result.
This is a fascinating writing exercise, because the 1978 neurologist would have to be very careful. They would not be allowed to diagnose 2026 Leslie. They would only be allowed to ask questions.
That’s what makes it powerful.
Grand Rounds: The Child Returns
Blue Bird Circle Clinic for Pediatric Neurology
Follow-Up Conference, Imagined From 1978
Good morning.
Several decades ago, we presented the case of an 11½-month-old child with cerebral hypotonia, developmental delay, abnormal reflexes, and concern for hypotonic cerebral palsy. At the time, we explicitly informed the family that we could not predict future motor function or intellectual capability. [cp bluebird 2q | PDF]
Today I would like to present a hypothetical exercise.
Let us imagine that the patient has returned.
Not six months later.
Forty-eight years later.
The First Surprise
The first surprise is that the patient survived.
That sounds harsh to modern ears, but physicians in 1978 were trained to think in prognostic uncertainty.
We were looking at an infant who:
- could not sit independently,
- could not crawl,
- demonstrated significant hypotonia,
- demonstrated delayed motor development,
- demonstrated objective neurological abnormalities. [cp bluebird 2q | PDF]
If you had asked us then:
Will this child finish school?
We would not know.
If you had asked:
Will this child be independent?
We would not know.
If you had asked:
Will this child become a writer?
We would not know.
The central feature of this case was uncertainty. [cp bluebird 2q | PDF]
The Second Surprise
The second surprise is that the patient appears to have compensated magnificently.
The adult before us is articulate.
The adult before us writes constantly.
The adult before us has maintained employment, pursued higher education, built relationships, and developed substantial insight into their own functioning.
This often seduces clinicians into asking the wrong question.
The wrong question is:
What happened to the disability?
The better question is:
What adaptations occurred?
A Clinical Trap
One of the most common mistakes in adult medicine is to assume that visible competence disproves underlying difficulty.
It does not.
The fact that an adult can produce excellent writing does not automatically explain:
- fatigue,
- executive dysfunction,
- sensory overload,
- social exhaustion,
- difficulty sustaining employment,
- difficulty navigating environments designed for other people.
A person may compensate for decades.
Compensation is not the same thing as absence.
What We Would Ask
If this patient returned to clinic today, I would not begin with a diagnosis.
I would begin with questions.
Functional Questions
Can the patient:
- maintain employment consistently?
- maintain routines reliably?
- transition between tasks easily?
- manage cognitive load effectively?
Sensory Questions
Does the patient become overwhelmed by:
- noise?
- lighting?
- crowds?
- textures?
- environmental instability?
Developmental Questions
How much energy is required to achieve what appears effortless to others?
How long has that energy expenditure been occurring?
Were there signs throughout childhood that were interpreted as personality rather than neurology?
The Psychiatric Question
This is where the case becomes truly interesting.
Suppose someone tells me:
The patient has experienced psychiatric crises.
My next question is not:
Which psychiatric disorder?
My next question is:
Are we observing a primary psychiatric condition, or are we observing the cumulative effects of a lifetime spent compensating for an underlying developmental condition?
That is a very different line of inquiry.
I do not know the answer.
But I know enough to ask the question.
The Autism and ADHD Question
In 1978, neither autism nor ADHD would have been conceptualized the way they are today.
Particularly not in a child who already presented with significant motor concerns.
Today, however, clinicians would probably ask:
Is there a neurodevelopmental framework capable of explaining multiple phenomena simultaneously?
Again, this is not a diagnosis.
It is a question.
Good medicine begins with curiosity.
The Most Important Finding
The most important finding in this entire case may not be neurological.
It may be psychological.
The patient spent decades assuming that every struggle represented a personal failure.
Now the patient has documentation showing that specialists were worried before the child could speak. [cp bluebird 2q | PDF]
That changes the narrative.
Not because it erases responsibility.
Not because it guarantees a diagnosis.
But because it demonstrates that the story did not begin in adulthood.
The story was already visible in infancy. [cp bluebird 2q | PDF]
Final Discussion
As physicians, we often want to solve cases.
This is not a solved case.
This is a case still in progress.
A neurologist in 1978 looked at an infant and said:
We do not know what this child will become. [cp bluebird 2q | PDF]
A clinician in 2026 looks at the same person and says:
We still have questions.
But now we have forty-eight additional years of data.
The goal is no longer prediction.
The goal is understanding.
And perhaps that is the greatest gift medicine can offer:
Not certainty.
Not labels.
But a coherent narrative.
A way for the child and the adult to finally become the same person.
Scored with Copilot, conducted by Leslie Lanagan
What’s one piece of travel advice you always follow?
View all responses
Find your comfort level and recreate it in any country.
My comfort level is Hilton. Nothing fancy, just stable. I was reminded of this when I went to the Fenwick Inn in Delaware. It’s so cute and cozy, but it is also chaotic. Lots of little maintenance issues in the rooms, etc. It took time and energy I did not have to pack up my stuff to move when the shower was broken.
At the Hilton, everything works and breakfast has already been purchased. I can find that baseline in other countries without having to guess how I’ll be treated in advance. Sticking with them adds free nights through points, so it’s worth it to pick a hotel chain you like and keep going there.
The Fenwick Inn was cheaper but no it wasn’t.
The sensory experience was exorbitant.
At the Hilton, I can get a disabled suite that has a bathtub. I have balance issues, so I don’t like a stand-up shower when I want to shave. Alternatively, there’s usually an indoor pool, which also has a hot tub. Either of those are great in inclement weather. What is doubly great is having those things at my beck and call, but not owning them.
Again, maintenance is a neurodivergent nightmare. The cognitive load of remembering to service things will eat your lunch…. so pay up front. It’s the same technique while traveling. You are not paying for luxury, you are paying for stability in a place where you don’t know anyone.
The key to having a great experience while traveling is not to be dysregulated by everything. If there is no Hilton where I want to travel, at least I know what kind of hotel I am looking for. Clean, well-maintained, with trained staff and no issues in the rooms. That is not five-star accommodation. That is respect for myself. Sure, I can spend an enormous amount of energy on my environment. I have been doing it for eons. But is that where my energy should go?
I want to have room to explore the country I’m in, and that comes with not being exhausted and overloaded before the day even starts. It is a different proposition to wake up in a place where you don’t know anyone when you are well-rested and comfortable vs. stuck in the almost of sleep because the electricity is too loud and the toilet won’t stop running.
If you have never said, “the electricity is too loud,” then you are probably not neurodivergent. It is a thing among our people to hear it. But it’s not just electricity. It’s refrigerator and HVAC hums as well. Insulation matters for soundproofing in a hotel………….
Istanbul, under Frank Wisner’s nose
The cognitive load of worrying about where to find food in the morning is also solved, as well as the all-important first cup of coffee.
Everything about the way I travel is about reducing cognitive load so that I have room for new cultures and experiences. I take them in slowly, and generally want at least four or five days in a place so that I feel the transition culturally both ways. It is also cognitive load to return home, because the vacation task list and the home task list are not the same.
It is also very important to me to shop while I’m traveling, because I love to wear memories. It means a lot to me to open the dresser and take out not just a shirt, but a picture in my mind of the place where I was when I bought it. And it’s not about going shopping…. it’s about going toward something else and seeing a shirt in a shop window and having the time to detour because I haven’t planned a trip within an inch of its life.
It is amazing what you can do with your time and energy when you realize you own it. Masking is essentially saving up all your energy for other people. In a lot of ways, I did not realize that I would never fit into someone else’s framework, and I have spent a lot of time talking about other people’s motivations toward me because those people’s feelings actually mattered. I did not assume that my needs mattered and spent energy writing about a conflict that didn’t need energy put into it.
Aada was emotionally unavailable, and any attempt to get her to see my emotions would have failed because she isn’t processing them. At that point, I should have stopped talking and closed the door, but I didn’t because I needed her approval so badly and was in constant anxiety thinking that God knows what could be happening God knows where….. because in her context, that’s not a guess. That’s a constant.
I was not spending energy trying to punish anyone, least of all Aada… but I was spending energy trying to explain her to me because she wouldn’t explain herself. I have come to realize that it’s not that she wouldn’t. She didn’t know how, and I didn’t know how to explain myself, either. I do not want to say that we’ll never talk again because stranger things have happened. But what I do know is that it is not possible to see her in the same way that I used to, because she broke my trust and I broke hers.
It is not that we cannot rebuild; it is that I have seen no evidence that she wants to spend energy on it. I do not know the reason, but I can guess. But what I can say is that I have owned my half absolutely and have been doing it all along, walking away with my nervous system settled because I haven’t been keeping my emotions bottled for years on end.
In the past, we both kept our emotions bottled to try and please the other. The difference between us is that when Aada says she doesn’t like something, I turn it over in my brain and start making changes. When I say I don’t like something, Aada tells me to go to hell and complains that the narrative is repetitive. Of course it is repetitive. She didn’t change anything, so I cannot write anything different.
There’s no dictatorship around me anymore, because my parents were just as authoritative and why I was so comfortable with that dynamic. I was allowed to have all the emotions they said I could and that has been a recurring theme in all of my adult relationships.
I do not believe that Aada has changed that much since the last time I talked to her, and I am not interested in signing up for a situation in which I am lesser-than. But if she wants to see me at full-tilt, I will happily sign on for that…. when she’s capable of being full-tilt as well.
Figuring out that part of it is not longing for Aada. It is figuring out what I will tolerate from someone else and giving Aada grace. There’s a path to a happy relationship after the fallout, but it doesn’t come without reparative work…. accepting that she’s already told me she doesn’t want to do the work and knowing she’s said that a hundred times before and has always come home. It’s not about predicting what she will or won’t do. It’s having the openness to say “I will always love you whether we are in communication or not.” I do not wish to put enmity out into the world, and I also do not want to lose respect for myself. I want a clean boundary…. she is welcome if and only if she is ready to be the non-puffed up version of herself. That is the Aada I love. The lines on her face tell a wonderful story, one that I have loved reading for over a decade.
She never needed to be anything but herself and thought that wasn’t enough. She thought I betrayed her when she left me with no other options. She was only digital scaffolding, refusing to get in the weeds when I needed it because her words were troubling to me. I was confused and upset a lot of the time and told I was too much because of it…. then told I was using this blog as a weapon and a shield when I vented about not being heard.
Meanwhile, going back over my old entries with AI and my therapist has given me a better narrative than what I’d allowed myself to see through rose-colored glasses. Aada was indeed a 3D character, the most technically gifted I’ve become at character study because I loved her enough to want to work out our problems. It is not that I think of her as a character. It is that my impressions of her are not her and never will be. She is wholly other, not an accessory to me. Her character is that she wanted me to think she was cool, and I absolutely did. But it came through my love of her little quirks, the things that only she would say/do in any given situation. It did not come from awe, because I am physically incapable of admiring another person that way.
I don’t adore excellence. Excellence has been expected of me since childhood, and this was not parentally induced. My parents gave me the love of music, sure, but they didn’t choose HSPVA for me. They didn’t choose Summer Jazz Workshop, either. The difference between my dad and me is that he’s Wayne Bergeron and I’m Miles Davis.
Miles’ brand of jazz is known to everyone, but Bergeron is subtle. Not a household name, but you’d know him in an instant- he’s the lead trumpet player on “The Incredibles” soundtrack. The first five notes are a hook.
Meanwhile, I am and have always been Kind of Blue.
“Kind of Blue” represents me as a person, particularly the bass line in “All Blues.” In terms of excellence, most of the population isn’t into jazz, but those that are would be interested to know that I am not famous, but I played with famous names 30 years before the public knew them. I was in Jazz II, which meant that a lot of the percussionists (drums and keyboard) rotated in and out depending on what charts were on the set list. So, I wasn’t playing with Robert Glasper and Eric Harland every day, but they were a part of my soundscape at Stanford (the name of the street where HSPVA used to be).
When I was a sophomore, the freshman I usually beat out in chair tests kept grinding and achieved success with The Suffers. I am so proud of Jon Durbin because in my opinion, he is the road not taken. I loved being in jazz band. The idea of joining a band and going on the road was what was foreign. I do not crave that kind of adrenaline in daily life, because I do not want to have to create my entire structure on my own. I am not built for a gig economy in which my living situation changes constantly no matter what genre of music I choose.
Therefore, I am not jealous of the people around me who made it big, nor do I have parasocial relationships with them now- I just care about them as former classmates, and people assume it is name-dropping because they do not know or care about my history. I may never have hung out at Jason Moran’s house, but we’re close enough that I would be concerned if something was up (it’s not, I’m just sayin.’).
I also have a strong lineage because you learn a lot by listening- Jason wasn’t in my band, but he was a senior when I was a freshman. It was a good opportunity to pick up knowledge, and he said the most important thing was listening. So I listened to him, literally. I have continued that tradition. RFK in the Land of Apartheid lives rent free in my head.
I can be proud of something. Robert missed going to school with Jason. I didn’t. 😉
No shade on him, though. Elkins is a fantastic program and if I’d known Robert was at Elkins freshman year I would have tried to get closer to him. That’s because back in the day, you didn’t have to live in the district to go to HSPVA and people were from all over. I never would have guessed that Robert and I both lived in the Sugar Land area. I learned it from Wikipedia. As it was, I saw him every day for History in addition to being in Jazz II together. He was a funny kid, comedic in all the right ways.
At last meeting, I said, “Robert, I didn’t know you were this talented.” I was smiling and warm. He said, “I didn’t know I was this talented, either.” We laughed together and it was relaxed and comfortable after the shock of seeing each other (“oh, SHIT! You from the CRIB!”). I would choose Robert over the bear, which in today’s society is the highest praise I can give an artist. I don’t care how technically gifted you are (and he is), my standard is that you have to be a good person. You can feel the difference instantly.
People who have enormous talent do not feel the need to trash others. People who stand next to people who have enormous talent are exhausting. I hate it when people try to be competitive as if their experience trumps mine. I would rather be collaborative and share. I have found that only truly great talents are capable of giving others room to be themselves. It is the difference between getting results through teamwork and getting results through fear and intimidation.
I am not myself in any room because I have connections like Robert, Jason, and Eric. I am myself in any room because Dr. Robert Morgan (“Doc”) taught us all during the school year and I don’t know about them, but Conrad Johson taught me in the summer as well. Excellence was not “way up there.” It was the air.
Church was a rigorous arts program in its own right, and I am glad that I had choir directors that were demanding as a child because I don’t play trumpet anymore and have switched to voice entirely. That does not mean that what I am telling you does not influence my travel. It absolutely does. I want to go to amazing cities with jazz festivals, hoping to meet old classmates by accident because there is no family like HSPVA family.
It’s not unusual to go to a jazz concert and be able to pick out the players from the crowd even when they’re not on the bandstand. The trumpet player is quietly doing the fingerings on the table. The drummer is straight up itching.
I travel to find other people who are comfortable with rigging, and not being in front of the lights.
