If you had to switch lives with a fictional character for a week, who would you choose?

View all responses

I would want to switch lives with The Doctor, which means that I would not have the brain that they do and would need to lean on Kate and UNIT to get things done. That being said, I think I could improvise my way through a normal day at UNIT which is crazy by anyone else’s standards.

I wouldn’t be going in blind, because I’d have advice from Aada floating in my head. Mostly just to keep calm and think fast. Rule following gets you nowhere in The Doctor’s universe, or ours, really. I am more powerful than I’ve ever been simply because I see the machinery behind society and I want to change it. It’s time to burn down the entire system of governance because it was built on the labor of enslaved people.

It takes someone at The Doctor’s altitude to be able to change something this big. We need input from other nations, particularly Scandinavia and the Nordics, because their governance is built on equality, not whiteness. To be clear, racism does exist in those countries, but it is not institutionalized, and that makes all the difference.

You do not appear before a judge wondering which system of justice you got, and that is the reality in America whether Donald Trump is the president or not. There are still people serving long sentences for carrying what is now a perfectly legal amount of pot on them, and that is just one way in which Black people are disproportionately paying for the crimes of all. A white person and a Black person in the same situation will be treated differently, because white people carrying the same amount were described as boys being boys and now, they shop at a dispensary that looks like an Apple store instead of still feeling the wrath of Nancy Reagan.

Being able to look at systemic problems like this from the outside would be helpful. A week away with a UK home and planet hopping would do me good. The only thing I need to remember is that I am only in charge of so much. The TARDIS is the real boss, and she knows it.

The relief would be in thinking about different problems so that I have new energy to bring back. It’s not just drug laws, it’s inequality in health care, the aftereffects of redlining, the destruction of affirmative action and DEI initiatives. It’s all too much, because that is just the domestic layer. At the same time, we are fighting too many wars for absolutely no reason. 

On a fundamental level, not our circus, not our monkeys.

We as a country are not known for our good boundaries these days, and “these days” isn’t the whole story. We’ve intruded on other countries besides Iran, they’re just our current obsession. Isolationism and Imperialism are best served by a nonbinary and not absolute, but at the same time it’s different to send supplies and support than it is to put American boots on the ground.

Because from my perspective, why?

Why risk American lives in a conflict that wasn’t ours to begin with? No one is asking for our help except Netanyahu, and that is officially bad business. It is the same in Russia. Twisting Zelenskyy’s story so that he is the aggressor is just funneling a message from the Kremlin. It does not represent American values; it expresses the fact that Trump sold his soul to Putin a long time ago. That is not United States messaging.

We in the United States love the Russian people and hate President Putin, and I’m sure that is how the rest of the world views America- they love the relatives they have here and cannot stand our leader…. which is entirely fair. I did not vote for him; I am living out the nightmare that comes with being the losing party.

Because the party didn’t lose. The country did.

Trump was always going to be a Russian UI (Useful Idiot) if not a full-on asset. Hillary Clinton told us that from the beginning…. and even though she is making the best of it, I am sure that she, like me, is watching the world burn and……………. concerned.

The only way to survive is to rise above, and a week with The Doctor would be flying over the issues the United States has. It’s easier to see them all when you’re looking down.

Have you ever liked a villain more than the hero? Who and why?

View all responses

Elphaba is my Christ figure.

I trust the person who got crushed by the machine more than the machine’s version of the story.

I do not need to believe that she lived. I read the book. She was crushed by the political machine and she died. The stage play covers it all up, and I would argue that is what happened to Jesus. He was crushed by the political machine in Rome, and his followers couldn’t bear it, so the Gospels are a response to grief.

That makes the Bible more true, more human…. not less. Resurrection does not need to happen at the cross. It needs to happen in the garden of Gethsemane, where you are arguing whether or not you are ready to take on the gargantuan task of living out your political beliefs. Jesus was not a fool. He knew that his hour was coming, but I do not believe that it was a divine plan. I believe that like Martin Luther King, Jr. after him, he had a sense of where the crowd was going and internalized that he was doing something politically dangerous that could get him killed.

The historical Jesus is dead, but his ideas are very much alive. The political machinery that Donald Trump is presenting is very much like The Wizard in nature- “nothing to see here” and “everything is fabulous” while the world is clearly burning. In this day and age, Jesus is:

• Macklemore
• Ms. Rachel
• Dolly Parton
• Jimmy Carter

People who stand up for the right things even when it’s hard. 

Dolly comes from a very conservative Evangelical area of the country. It did not stop her from responding during the AIDS crisis, while AIDS never escaped the president’s lips (it’s true. Reagan never even said “AIDS” publicly during his presidency and between 1981 and 1989, more than 89,000 Americans died of AIDS.).

The same can be said of Jimmy Carter, who used his faith to be president for all the people, not just the ones he liked. God appears in the people you like the least, and his political opponents were fierce in standing up for everything he hated- the 1980s ushered in individualism and cruelty because of it. The social safety net started to crumble and we as a nation decided not to care.

Now we are reaping the benefits.

None of the political machinery that Elphaba and Jesus fought against is gone.

It’s all hidden in the fairy tale we made up.

What’s the longest book you’ve ever read?

View all responses

If my blog were printed, it would be roughly 350 encyclopedias long. But I haven’t just read it, I’ve created it, so I see it differently than you do- in some cases, I remember the exact place I wrote it. I always remember the story behind the story unless it has been many years, one of the reasons I’m so persnickety about making Aada vivid. I don’t remember my first wife at all anymore.

My first wife was not as worthy of remembrance as Aada is now and has been for the last 12 years. She says that she does not know how anyone could read about themselves without coming away with self-revulsion. That’s not how it feels to read, but that’s how it feels to write. I got tired of not liking myself. I got tired of Aada not liking me because she said my narrative was about her was repetitive without doing anything to change it. My writing reflects my thoughts. If we’re doing the same thing, I’m going to write down the same thing.

That’s how that works.

I would have loved to have written a story of a blogger and a fan with an explosive connection that turned into racing each other to Wawa to buy each other coffee and ice cream. But it didn’t. It sort of did. There were a lot of digital Starbucks cards passed between us. It just came with Xs and Os on the page, and not an arm around my shoulder. It was heavy with no foundation, like knowing that books were welcome but running into each other? Awkward.

I did not know how to navigate myself nor her, and I think you did get the best of what could be said. You also got the worst. Now things are different because it’s the first day of school- a new chapter…. hopefully without forgetting where I came from. She says that she’s probably too old to change. That’s where I kiss her head and say it’s okay. So am I.

I am being dragged into change, and in some sense, I regret every bit of it. But all change that is good is designed to make you stretch. Life was not happier when it was me and Aada through the computer in an isolated bubble. But it feels like it was when you’re not there yet. You’re in limbo. You can see the change, but you have not become it.

All I can do is dress for success, so here’s what that means in homeschool terms: I’m wearing jeans and a t-shirt with a line drawing of Galway Bay, the Irish pub I visited in Annapolis. I am comfortable and relaxed enough to focus on human rights.

I am getting a huge kick out of Macklemore’s success and the egg on both P!nk and Ed Sheeran’s faces. Neutrality favors the oppressor. Always. Even Ed’s own band has walked out on him now because not taking a stand is taking a stand.

I am going to the Thrift Shop to celebrate.

What’s the best advice you’d give to someone younger than you?

View all responses

Make the effort to know your own body so that you have an acute sense of what is wrong. Emotions do not start as thoughts, they start as sensory perception. Discomfort starts with you. There’s a reason I often say that Aada “got under my skin.” Because she was remote, I felt her energy in the room, or thought I did. A lot of the time, the energy I made up for her was wrong, and I wasn’t sure how to fix it. I should have communicated more. I should have studied boundaries more in-depth, because Aada and I each failed each other.

Learn that lesson early. Everything is all your fault, so nothing is. Do you see what I mean? There is no relationship in your life in which you are going to win one hundred percent of the time, and thinking that you should is just a recipe for sparkling narcissism.

Instead of trying to find blame in someone else, learn what you did that didn’t feel right in your own body. That will help you try to find the truth between “what’s mine to own” and “what’s not.” I am sure that a lot of you sit around and try to find ways to blame yourselves if Aada’s letters are any indication. I have never been saying to myself that Aada was at fault for anything, and the joy of my life is being able to go back to myself 12 years ago and re-live everything at any time. Aada may not ever want to reconnect, but she cannot take away that she and I are an internet institution. Even she agrees that it wasn’t all bad, and I truly wish good things for her in the future. 

I broke my vow of silence on September 11th because I had a panic attack, and I hope she will forgive an unwanted email if she even got one. I am sure that by now she’s blocked my email address, and that is okay by me. I apologized when I realized what I had done and thanked her for putting me on the path towards school. It will come across as manipulative, I am sure.

That’s because it was. Intention does not equal impact, and I was thinking of my feelings and not hers. It’s not like my birthday and the surrounding days afterward aren’t a dumpster fire for her, too, just not in the way I might have imagined. Whenever I feel like I really screwed the pooch with Aada, it’s always realizing that she didn’t give me any scaffolding to succeed. That I failed, but there is a damn good reason why.

She thought that I was just like her, that I manage my feelings like a boss. I don’t. I manage my feelings like a therapist, processing with the appropriate person. Aada slowly isolated me from everyone on earth except her and then got irritated at the result. I cannot help that, nor am I asking for an apology- though it has been given (received, heard, felt, understood, loved, kissed goodbye, etc.).

“What was Missing” is hearing from her that she understands me. Forgiveness is instant. Processing my emotions takes a long time, because I am a naturally curious person and want to understand. My curiosity with Aada was always taken as offensive and pathologized when I was just trying to get to know her. All connections are valid, so I wasn’t “only after one thing.” If that were true, our relationship would have lasted 12 minutes and not 12 years.

Repair would be hearing the result after processing her own emotions, in as secluded an environment as she needs it to be. I’m just intimidated at being alone with each other, but if she’s not, then I’ll manage. I would have compromised on so many things, and she says that there are things that could be clarified…. I just don’t deserve that.

She’s just in a pissy mood and needs to take it out on me because of the “479 blog entries that left nails in my palms.” OMG. You know your life has hit rock bottom when they use a crucifixion reference to describe your writing…… But it’s ok. My government teacher told me how to handle people like that. He said to tell her (meaning my mother) that she’d be fine ’cause I’d stop by to wipe the blood off her cross every day.

John Ben died recently, I heard through the grapevine. Farewell to a most excellent atheistic foil…..

A/Theism is the greatest love story ever told, and the truth is in the slash -Pete Rollins

There are so many people in your life who will make your personal choices about them. Some of it is valid. Some of it is not. You have to know when to be firm and when to…….. not. I have said so many things to Aada that I regret simply because if there are lines from her that live rent-free in my head there are certainly things I’ve said that have wrecked her.

For that I owe several thousand apologies, flowers (hopefully seeds we could plant together), and a six pack of the best local brew because a drink is best shared among friends. I waffle between thinking that my work to do is to forget that Aada existed and thinking that the best thing is to feel integrated about it. The relationship went wrong, but I am a better person for having known her.

I do not know whether she can say the same about me.

But what I do know is that I haven’t said that every day, or implied it, because it took being able to see our relationship from Such Great Heights to be able to let go of the emotions surrounding it. Not everything is heightened anymore. She feels soft in my memory, the face I look to for love even now, not knowing if that’s okay.

It has to be, she gave me a picture in which she knew she was “looking at me.”

Make your friends take those pictures. They are absolutely the ones worth treasuring. It is how I know she loves me, not in an “I’m hot for you” sort of way. In an “I enjoy you so much that I’m not quite sure what to do with it” kind of way. Admiration for a writer is a serious thing. I get it, because I’ve had those crushes before…. but I didn’t get one on me until I read me through my beautiful girl’s eyes and ignored my own.

She’s such a firecracker, and one day I hope that these pages will remind her of that. She says that she doesn’t like the portrayal she got, but the picture is skewed because she threw red paint in the center and asked me to pretend it wasn’t there on multiple levels.

She often accused me of painting my feelings as fact. I hear that criticism, but I cannot absorb it wholly because I do not know any storytellers who ask the opinion of everyone in the room and take a consensus on what the story is before they write. A better approach would have been a production meeting offline, and what can I say but that we are both chickenshit losers for not making it happen?

We both intimidated the everliving shit out of each other, and what I wish that she could have seen is a more polished version of what I wrote. She was getting the shitty first draft (SFD) phase every morning and not looking back over a year. It will look different when it is edited, bound, and if she wants it, signed.

But she’s already pre-empted herself by saying, “guess you won’t dedicate that first novel to me. I’ll never know.” Then 15 seconds later…. “for now, all I want is peace.” I believe that creatively we are both fed by the tension, but it gets to be too much emotional dysregulation and we shut each other down…. then time goes by and we miss each other because we don’t remember the dyregulation part of it.

Advice to younger people- this is called “creating your own drama.” Losing Aada was the worst thing that has ever happened to me in my entire life, and I will never truly get over it. I want her back in a way that is primal but directed into self-improvement and self-empowerment. I cannot control what Aada ever does in her life, but what I can do is take her criticisms to heart and decide which ones are truly valid.

Not to do so would be saying to myself (and the world) that she didn’t really matter to me…. that she doesn’t matter to me. In effect, Aada is giving me back my capacity to love the world, because she tilted my heart in that direction. I can love the shape of her for all time in memories and in the work I’ll do with other people. Some of our problems give me highly specialized empathy.

But what I won’t do is let her off the hook for isolating me and then lying to me in such a way that made her want to keep lying instead of coming clean on the first pass. The house in my head that I built for her was too large, because she had puffed herself up. What she does not see is that I roll with reality, and that is the disconnect. She does not want to tell me what reality is in the aftermath of her “one lie.”

We ended up abandoned each other to the wolves, and we should both be ashamed of our actions in those months. We were too harsh- expressing hugs and cheek kisses would have gone a long way. We both feared expressing affection. I felt like I couldn’t do it right and didn’t want to try. How do you put toothpaste back in a tube? I wish I had listened so much more than I talked, because she was telling me what I was trying to learn in ways that were upside down and backwards to the way I understood how the play was supposed to go.

I don’t pick up social cues well, especially over the internet. If you’re young, figure that out quick. It’s good knowing that I have a different cognitive style than most people, and that I probably read Aada wrong for a lot of our relationship as well. I could have had so much more empathy with more communication, like facial expressions, handshakes, hugs, etc.

When my temper got out of control, I was a little bastard internet troll and she didn’t deserve that shit, either. She was just very good at returning fire; it didn’t take much and we were both trying to cut each other off at the knees. We were both in trauma hell, but on way different playing fields.

Advice to my younger self is to cultivate long relationships, but I still cannot tell you how to do that because ADHD and autism do not bode well for them. I’m learning, though. I made a friend yesterday that actually invited me to go do something, and another today. I feel like I am re-grounding myself after a walk in the clouds.

It’s ancient wisdom to touch grass, and it’s coming in handy now.

My advice to anyone younger…. make sure that early on in a relationship, grass is included. There’s no substitute for sitting outside in the sunshine on a quilt with a basket, drinking in Vitamin D and pinot grigio.

What’s one thing that would instantly improve your city?

View all responses

The longer I live here the more the land is so beautiful it makes me weep. The people are the problem. It’s just hard to work together and hard to keep the astounding beauty in mind as the goal. Plus, we all have different ways we can and will contribute, so it’s a mess. Think “church committee from hell” because of the scale.

When I say “the people are the problem,” I am including myself. I am a Methodist preacher’s kid, so I have a shit ton of experience in “God is perfect…. us? Not so much.” Maryland is a variation on a theme, because I feel God everywhere I walk. 

You just feel the pull of the divine in everything, particularly swimming in the Bay at Sandy Point State Park. Where you absolutely do not feel the divine is being stuck in a long line at Giant Pharmacy. There’s a trick to Baltimore.

Slow your ass down.

It will be so much more enjoyable to you if you realize that the culture is asking everyone in line how they’re doing. Have a Coke and a smile and shut the fuck up, which was Richard Pryor’s advice to Bill Cosby when Cos complained to him that Ennis was a fan.

I like Richard Pryor a lot.

That quote also makes me wonder if Aada and Tiina’s kids are fans, or if Dana has remarried and she has kids that are fans. I doubt it, but the ecosystem of lives I’ve touched is interesting to me. My stats say that someone in Northern Virginia loves me, but I cannot assume it is the people I think. I can only think in universes, not specifics.

Because I can imagine that it would be fun to peek inside your mom or dad’s life, and I’m aware of it on a different scale because of 16yo & 10yo. At the same time, I cannot disappear into my friends’ lives, either. I cannot stop writing my thoughts because it is uncomfortable for them, because that is letting my friends run over me.

For instance, being aware that nothing I said is a reflection on Heytch, Mummo, Jonna, anyone. Reality is knowing that they’ll take it that way, anyway….. with the added bonus of not talking to me to get their story straight, just changing the ecosystem that reads on their own. I am not for everyone, so I have to be for myself.

The same struggle between individual and city that lives in me lives in Baltimore itself. I am an internet institution. It is an American institution. 

Baltimore knows who it is, which is older and more established than DC. It was founded by the English and is now culturally Jewish and Black in a way that no city can match. If you love DC but want to stay out of Congress’s way, come here. It makes the monuments and the pageantry something you choose instead of something you live.

Brandon Scott is like all mayors- incredible wins at some things, losses at others. But for the most part, Baltimoreans are content and I admire any mayor who can do that. I wish I could be as helpful to him as my sister is to the mayor of Houston, but that is not my gift. Best I can do is take your number and pass it along.

Lindsay is DC, I am Baltimore. In terms of political personalities, she is clearly the Michelle, and I am clearly the Barack. I can do all the speeches and stuff, but you have to point me in the right direction. I would rather be at the law library, and I am fully aware that Lindsay is in charge.

My job is to build a life in Maryland that fits, and Baltimore does. I just need to put more shoe leather into meeting up with people outside of group therapy and all that. What you are seeing now are the results of exhaustive work on myself and not being ashamed of the path it took to get me to stability. I feel comfortable in my skin here, because I don’t identify as Baltimore or DC or Annapolis. I treat it like a triangle and do things in all of them. This is not a slam against Baltimore. It is respecting a boundary.

You’ll never be from Baltimore if you didn’t grow up here, so stop trying. Recognize your otherness.

I think that one thing that could be improved is the welcoming committee. It is hard to know how to plug in when you move here. Maybe that’s an initiative I could take on. I’ll ask Brandon about it on Threads because that’s the least intrusive way to pitch an idea.

Yes, a welcoming committee is old fashioned.

They also work.

What’s the longest trip you’ve ever taken?

View all responses

The longest trip I’ve ever taken was when I apparently hallucinated a Naval Officer saying she was my River Song and that she’d had a fight with her son over me and they weren’t speaking and all this bullshit, bullshit, bullshit (in retrospect). I lost the plot, but at the time it seemed so real. You’d just have to take a history and physical to know why this storyline seemed so legible to me in my delusions. But unfortunately for you, that H&P has already been taken and I am not eager to repeat it.

There was one line that was repeated ad nauseam that made me sick(er).

A genuine line, and “you are always the best.”

A line insinuating that I am dark, manipulative, and cruel? You are always the best.

I thought that CIA was with me in the psych ward. I saw Jonna and several other players; everything made perfect sense because she is the former Chief of Disguise.

And if that wasn’t enough, I hallucinated a man coming up to me insinuating that he was Aada’s husband and he said, “if I was dead, you could have her to yourself.” I looked at him and said, “no, the fuck I couldn’t. Who even are you?” Everything was designed to trigger me into reacting, such as pointing me to a locked door and telling me that Meagan (the Canadian Ex) was behind it. Two guys on the street even asked me to prove it was me by asking what Meagan called me in high school. I said, “Wingnut,” and they told me which door to knock on….. so it is inconceivable to me that I was literally out of my mind. You don’t get other people to participate in your hallucinations, or at least, I didn’t.

I hallucinated that the naval officer in question lead a double life between NoVA and Africa, and she wanted me to live with her in her Africa life, not her NoVA one. And I was just crazy enough to say, “ok. Sure. Whatever.” Now, this was also someone from my past, so I have to wonder if all of it came from “somewhere over the rainbow.” I just do not know whether it was my own brain or whether it was The Wizard’s that was actually in charge.

I felt out of control of my own life, and had to focus on stability afterwards. I do feel a deep connection to the Navy now, though. I bought a windbreaker that’s Naval Academy colors and a navy t-shirt that has the big N and the red star, but the N is filled with a Maryland flag pattern. I love the Navy, but I am staking claim on a different geographical area than my inspiration. I also wanted to pick up some Marines merch in honor of Mummo, but I ran out of money and will have to go back. 

I do not love Heytch more than Mummo. I love navy blue and naval gear has a lot of it. Not so much with the Marines, but I did find a couple of t-shirts I wanted. I’m also hot to go to the military surplus stores in Glen Burnie to pick up gear, because they’re generally the only game in town with pants that fit me.

The main point is that my life is influenced by the military and intelligence, but I am genuinely confused about the degree. I do not think that intelligence is out to get me, but I would not be surprised if they were curious about my work. They would be curious because I am, too. How do you reverse engineer a hallucination to pick out what is true and what isn’t?

It is also unusual for a hallucination to create two stories in front of you and you have to pick the one that is valid. In one story, Heytch wanted to disappear me into Africa so that she didn’t have to be out in NoVA. In another, Heytch and Mummo created a nonprofit for me and I could come and live with their crew as long as I was willing to give up everything in my current life. 

I absolutely was, which is why both stories appealed to me. I was not disappointed that one was true and one was not. I was crushed that both stories weren’t real….. and mystified as to whether those ideas came from my center of gravity or someone else’s. Because in one story, my friends cared about me and provided an intervention. In another, I was on my own.

I like the version in which my friends helped me, because I’m on the right path now.

And the best part is that I don’t need proof.

What’s your best tip for budget travel?

View all responses

You get what you pay for, and budget travel generally means having to deal with a series of tiny issues in an unfamiliar place. Some people are very good at flying by the seat of their pants, but I’m not one of them. I need stability, and bargain-basement shopping will not do that. The one thing I suggest is having several friends check out the flight you want to buy, and have them buy it for you from their location. For some reason, every single time I’ve flown to Portland, it was cheaper to buy it in Portland than Houston. Geolocation matters, because there are different prices in different areas of the country.

So if you want to go to Northern Europe, pick six friends in the US and PayPal whomever has the lowest base price. It probably won’t be you.

You can also get what you want by traveling when no one else wants to, so you get the same nice hotel but it’s cheaper because Helsinki is 50 below or whatever. It will be so much nicer if you try to fit into the infrastructure of the place you want to go rather than trying to fit it to your American expectations. I fully expect to freeze my ass off in Helsinki, because no matter how many layers you put on, cold is cold. But at the same time, I have the city to myself and all the other tourists are back in the States.

I do not want “show mode” Helsinki. I want kahvi and Hessburger….. a Long Drink, maybe some salmiakki ice cream……

I just want to eat my way across the country in peace. 😉

I told my dad I wanted to spend my 50th in Helsinki, and that’s been a running theme for the last two years. I really want to go to the Independence Day festivals on Dec. 6th, but the problem with that is I have rarely found anyone willing to sign up for that kind of cold, but I might get people to come with me if I’m flexible on dates.

Plus, my birthday is around Labor Day, so the air will be crisp; the kind of frost that lives in your bones comes later.

If it were up to me, it would be me and Aada and whomever she wants to invite, because I know that she is the center of my world, but I am not the center of hers. She has a husband, and I am so happy for her…. and also ridiculously happy that I do not. It’s not about gender. I don’t want to marry anyone. I just want to date people and forget about the relationship escalator. I want relationships to last for a long time, but what I will not do is put hopes and dreams into them, particularly surrounding exclusivity. Women have been primed to believe that one person can be your entire world, when that is absolutely not the case for anyone. Thinking that one person can be everything to you is just sparkling isolation.

I’ve also been married and divorced twice, so I am relieved of the notion that when you meet The One it’s going to last forever. My forever has been in Aada, the muse that inspires me creatively, but would rather have a root canal than be romantic with me. Believe me, I get it. If Ariana Grande and Pete Davidson didn’t make it, we wouldn’t, either.

I have chaotic neutral line cook energy. So does he.

Ariana Grande is perfectly perfect in every way. So is she.

I’m not talking about specifics, here…. just vibe. You ever look at couples and think, “I just don’t see it?” That’s us….. sort of like being twins but one of us is Arnold Schwarzeneggar and one of us is Danny DeVito. And then you hear us argue like an old married couple who are both ready to smother each other in their sleep and you think, “ohhh. There it is.” Not actually romantic, more of an Oscar and Felix situation.

“The Odd Couple” is a fantastic name for us because the odd couple in the show wasn’t queer, either. They were two divorced men who packed it up to live together. Homoerotic energy? Debatable, because the longer I live the easier it is to see that there isn’t one type of connection. Men are capable of astounding intimacy, we just don’t allow them the room to be unmasked and fragile.

“Macho” is a mask. Full stop.

Connecting to people is all about unmasking, because people value authenticity and don’t want to feel like you’re selling something. Not a product, most likely an idea. It is off-putting when you’re just trying to get through the day and the other person is in “Show Mode.”

The reason I love Finland so much is that they have never heard of “Show Mode.”

How can you identify the most extroverted Finn? They look at YOUR shoes when they talk.

I cannot wait to be with my people. Not on a budget designed to be Top Ramen for every meal, but one that is flexible and supports my very persnickety neurodivergent needs. Being autistic is expensive.

Lean in.

Who is your favorite cartoon character?

View all responses

I don’t have much to say, just a video. “Player” is basically my alter ego at this point.

How does your mindset affect your financial success?

If there is anything that you should not learn from a person with ADHD, it’s probably financial in nature. I am certain that some people are good at budgeting, but ADHD is very special at impulsivity and that includes purchases. My budget is basically “there has been some sort of struggle.“

I am lucky in that my sister and my father help me with my money. That’s probably been the biggest change in my financial planning because I don’t do it alone anymore. My family has agreed to help me because I am disabled. However, I am not sitting on my laurels. I am starting college on the 14th. I am currently in debate with myself and have until spring semester to transfer my credits from University of Houston. This is because the last time I was in school was like 2015. I am not sure I know anything anymore.

Plus, I really want to take con law again. I have my flight suit ready, and if you get that joke, you were in my class at UH. I am also willing to exchange tutoring for cookies and brownies.

And the last thing that you need to know is that today’s entry will be short because it’s my birthday and I’m going to the beach with my dad.