Diving Into the Tech

Write about your first computer.

I think there has only been one time in my life that I shared a computer with someone. My dad and I had a desktop in our apartment after my parents’ divorced, but it was easy because we were never using it at the same time. Here’s the one thing that was really funny…. I was running late on a paper for English, and I knew I could bang it out easily and be on time for class. So, I ran out of school at like, 11:00 AM and flew home (it seemed).

Then, my dad walked in for lunch and was genuinely surprised to see me not at school. The cool thing was that he saw I was working and just left me to it. He knows me. We’ve met. We only work exactly the same way. The adrenaline of the moment makes us write better. I do not remember a time when either of us finished a sermon before 0200 on Sunday morning. He just said, “are you skipping a day?” I said, “no, I’m late on a paper. I’ll be back by 1:00.” And that was the end of that.

The reason I remember it so clearly is that I was under a lot of pressure. I wasn’t doing well in school except for Microcomputer Applications, English, and Creative Writing (where’s the lie?). Math and science have always eluded me except in seventh grade, when we had a “group project” and I turned all autistic on it, writing down everything the teacher said so that my notes and lab calculations were correct.

He took me aside and said, “I gave you a higher grade than everyone else because it was so obvious that you carried everyone else on your back.” For instance, I would say that Lindsay did marginally better than me in Con Law thanks to me, because she had a transcription of every class. And yet, those are the only two classes in which I was any good (Con Law and Life Science).

I went to the city-wide science fair twice, and I don’t remember who came up with the ideas, me or my dad, but it wasn’t like he did the work for me. I just took his idea and expanded it.

In seventh grade, it had something to do with how dyes are carcinogens. It takes a very, very, very, very long time, but both blue and red are toxic, making grape Kool-Aid one of the worst things you can drink all day, every day (I do it a little bit now that it’s sugar free).

In eighth grade, it was all about car safety, but I don’t remember exactly what it was about…. maybe seatbelts? I don’t know. By then, science was the bane of my existence and my dad helped drag the project out of me. It wasn’t that I wasn’t interested in doing work. I wasn’t interested as much in the subject, so my mind wasn’t completely taken over with facts…..

It wasn’t grape Kool-Aid. Let’s not get stupid.

It wasn’t until I was in 11th grade that there was even a class called “Microcomputer Applications.” Because I already had techie friends, I figured out that we were networked with the middle school Lindsay attended. So, my first order of business was to “hack into” Lindsay’s user account at her school and leave a letter for her in her home directory. “Hack into” is in quotes because you had to know the person’s Social Security number. Yes, they were that stupid in the 90s. It was all new. This would have been 95-96, and I didn’t even have an e-mail address until the second half of my senior year (I gave up music altogether because I couldn’t graduate with an “Advanced Diploma” without moving my schedule around to accommodate MA and study hall.

Since my dad was at work, I had my own computer for the hour I was supposed to be in study hall, so basically I was the original “WFH.” I’d do homework a little bit at night, but mostly rushed it in study hall so I didn’t have to stay up until past midnight AND do a full load the next day.

The thing about my high school, and many others, is that teachers in your grade do not collaborate at all. They do not give a shit if they’re giving a high school kid six hours of homework a night while also expecting them to function during the day. Even if I started my homework after “Jeopardy!” at 1600 and “Animaniacs” at 1630, that still left me doing homework until midnight because I had to take breaks to eat, spend time with my family, and if I remembered, pee.

I also didn’t really have time for friends until late, because with my parents being divorced, I needed my own spending money. So, in addition to all that studying, I was a receptionist at SuperCuts. Sometimes Meagan (or Meagan and Tony) would come and pick me up from work and we’d go to Starbucks or Chili’s.

Back then, SBUX was new and basically the only bar for high schoolers. My first date ever with Meagan was that she picked me up for school and we went for a coffee run on the way. I am amused at myself in retrospect because I had never heard of a “Frappucino,” and I love being marketed to, so that’s what I wanted.

Meagan said, “are you sure? It’s December.” I didn’t pick up what she was saying because I didn’t know the word “frappe,” either. I’d never been north of the Mason-Dixon line (then), and she’s Canadian, not fluent in French but enough to have had a secret language from her kids until they started school….. why I’d be so happy in a Mexican-American family where Mom speaks English and the kids are all Big Macs and Coca-Cola, Spanish is lame.

Wait, Coca-cola is a bad American example…. Mexicans are Coke addicts and it’s a big damn problem. Fabulous documentary on YouTube. Even “beisball” is a bad example because Mexicans love it, too. Maybe our differences lie in apple pie and apple empanñadas. This paragraph is really making me miss Houston. If you look at the demographics, we don’t have an overwhelmingly Mexican population. I meet people from Central and South America all the time, but I haven’t met any Mexicans (yet).

If I find a pocket, that’s where I’d like to live. I’d get to practice my Spanish, if they needed it they could practice their English, and because I’ve been to Mexico so many times, we have some of the same cultural references…. especially since both Mexicans and I have had kitchen jobs. I’ve never worked in a kitchen in Texas, so I’ve never worked with Mexicans (Portland is so white the best representation is our hip-hop station. Another good reason I got out.). I have never worked in a kitchen where I didn’t have to speak Spanish, or learn words for things in Spanish on the fly because cooking moves fast.

It’s just again, Salvadorans, Hondurans, etc. I think what I’m missing is that the Mexicans I have met have such a strong connection to Texas. Therefore, more cultural references than I have with South America because even though the kitchen is common, our upbringings aren’t.

The worst time I’ve ever felt in the kitchen was because I broke a cultural taboo that I didn’t know was there. I couldn’t tell whether the dishwasher thought I was being a white entitled bitch or truly being horrible to him, but either way he couldn’t and wouldn’t explain what I’d said was wrong. We were practically besties before and never talked again, and because of the language barrier (I’m nowhere near fluent, especially if it’s not “Texican.”), he got pissed about giving me information at all- why I’d hurt him- and I got hurt because even if he opened up to me, I could only understand part of it.

It was a bad situation all the way around, because what I did know is that I said something about his mother. I know I deserved what I got, I just didn’t know that he wouldn’t take it the way an American would. “Yo Mama” jokes have been famous since the 80s. That’s why I think he was genuinely hurt- he had a cultural norm I didn’t.

I tortured myself over that for months, because I couldn’t explain and he didn’t want it. I did the best I could….. a very sincere, loving, “I am so sorry. I didn’t know.” And in fact, I still don’t know what I said that irked him, and it’s years later……… and still painful.

But other people don’t have to forgive you, and that’s okay. It’s on you to let go of guilt and move on. It’s how you get more resilient over time, because people walking away hurts less when you realize that first, you don’t get to decide how hurt someone else might be. You don’t get to decide how much apology is enough. You have to know when progress is being made and when you’re banging your head against the wall. Because getting to the point where you’re banging your heads against a wall means that you’re actually both hitting your heads against the wall and something’s got to give.

If you know what makes you happy inside yourself, your intuition will tell you which relationship you’re getting…. are you getting the one in which progress is being made, or are you getting the one where you’re spending time and energy on a relationship where the other person is “just not that into you.”

Speaking of which, I saw a meme that made me laugh. Someone had set up two books in a bookstore and snapped a picture…….

“God is Not Mad at You” -Joyce Meyer
“He’s Just Not That Into You” -Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo

Aside from the fact that I use the singular they for God, I couldn’t help myself. I needed that laugh. I’ve also loved Joyce Meyer for years, because I don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Plus, she has the same way of preaching that I do…. a female voice who projects with authority because so many men complain about hearing The Gospels and the sermon in a woman’s voice.

I feel like Joyce Meyer and I are Erik and T’Challah. It’s not that she doesn’t have a point. I’m not trying to take anything away from her audience. I’m only saying that in this case, she’s smart and also The AntiLeslie.

And, to be honest, I’m pretty sure she’s been married to a man for a long time, but she reminds me of “Suze Orman” on SNL…… “it’s ALL. ABOUT. THE. Jackets.”

The reason I don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater is that my dad was more conservative theologically than me, but not Joyce Meyer. His line about this was some dumbass came up to him in the “God Quad” at SMU and said, “I was a Methodist until I got saved.” My dad said, “I was a Baptist until I learned to read.” My dad has never been a Baptist, but Texans don’t let facts get in the way of a good story.

What I also mean is that I grew up listening to all this stuff because my dad didn’t generally use headphones. I got used to the sounds of the men’s voices, Fred Craddock’s in particular because he’s just about one of the most soft-spoken preachers you’ll ever meet…… who can also punch you in the gut emotionally with half a line (he was liberal for the time as well, taking care of the population of Appalachia).

Here’s the highest compliment I can give him, because it will make sense to the people that hate Christianity. He was a Jimmy Carter Christian. The kind that prays for you and then builds you a house…… because that’s how “thoughts and prayers” are supposed to work.

I also learned to love criticism of The Bible, because I was interested in studying it even when I didn’t feel all that moved spiritually.

It’s something I learned from Gordon Atkinson, a Texas preacher who became such an amazing blogger that he left the church to write full time. I think he’s doing books now, but here’s a link to his archive. I don’t normally put hyperlinks in my work so the past can stay past, but these essays run back to 2002.

Because the essays aren’t organized by date, I’ll just have to tell you what I learned from him rather than linking to that entry specifically. I was already in a mood, and I found a minister who was struggling with the same thing I was…. how called he felt, his imposter syndrome…. how sometimes he loses his faith when he’s doing hospital rounds and has to rescue himself, etc. I wasn’t doing a hospital rotation, but it’s something that I knew I would struggle with as well if I went the pastoral route.

Incidentally, the reason I didn’t go into ministry is the same reason I didn’t become a therapist. I can’t manage my own problems. That gives me two disadvantages. The first is that I will be constantly overwhelmed by other people’s problems and continue to not work on my own…… because it’s a monotropic thought process to think of other people first, because you like it. What says avoiding your own emotional work by pretending that other people’s problems are more important than yours?

When you start taking up room in the universe, you realize just how much you’re not getting by not asking for it. This is because once you start working on yourself, you know when you’re kowtowing to someone and afraid to take up room, or whether you’re trying to make progress. When the other person is receptive, that’s truly healthy. When your issues cause anger and frustration in them, that’s when the toxic cycle begins.

It actively says to the one who brings up problems that theirs are unimportant. Only the person who is completely shut down is allowed to need things. That’s because the person who expresses emotional needs and gets ignored tries even harder not to make the other person angry, because the last time they brought up an issue, all hell broke loose.

This cycle can go on for decades, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s with your first family or your partner and kids. Plus, there’s a lot of resentment and anger that boils under the surface when one person lays out their issues, and the other person seems receptive…. but “seeming” and “actually” are two different things.

Here is What I Know For Sure.™ In my relationship with Kathleen, if I brought up a minor problem, like housekeeping, she’d step all over my ass. When Dana started doing things like that, we spiraled out… mostly because at the time I was in it up to my ass and I didn’t have much patience. But what I learned is that when someone starts shutting down, that’s the end whether you like it or not.

Now, I have a lot of patience and if I expressed unhappiness about anything in my relationship with Zac, he wouldn’t just say “we’ll talk about it” and forget. He’d either remember on his own or send me a calendar invite to talk, either an audio/video call or in person.

That’s what I mean about it being the healthiest relationship I’ve ever had. I don’t have a partner who tries to kick the can down the road on hard conversations.

Speaking of hard conversations, I made a mistake because I was typing too fast. I am not Zac’s newest partner, but because I’m not around much, people think I am. We are also not cutesy in front of our friends, we are cutesy when we’re out on the town, which mostly means making people want to throw up in the grocery store.

The conversation was surrounding how, since we aren’t cutesy and aren’t together all that often, how do I fit into your life and what’s your bandwidth? That’s a hard conversation to have, because I was terrified that he’d say he was overwhelmed and we needed to break up because I live so far.

My logic was 100% upside down and backwards. We’re good for life as long as we stay where we are, with which I am completely comfortable. He’s just as dedicated to me as an orange string as I am to him. I need his friendship as much as his romance, at which he is very good.

He might not think so, but what really sticks in my mind as romance is remembering things I say. When I said I liked Bullet Coffee, he got me an immersion blender just because.

Editor’s Note:

In case you’re not familiar, Bullet Coffee is a tablespoon of grass-fed butter, a tablespoon of coconut oil, and very, very hot coffee in the blender. The official recipe is the tablespoons of oil and butter with 80z of coffee. I like Cafe Bustelo best. The reason I like it so much is that it provides all my morning calories and brain food at the same time, so 8oz of coffee is enough to start my day.

He sees when I’m struggling and likes helping out, and I don’t mean monetarily…. although he is sweet about telling me to put whatever I want in the cart at the grocery store and Trader Joe’s because he knows that I’ll want to have food and drinks at his house that I’d buy at mine.

The latest was kidding him about me being fake irritated that he was out of Dr Pepper Zero and he actually stopped by the store on the way home and bought a 12-pack. He had a million other drinks I could have chosen, just nothing sugar free.

Well, that’s not true. He has a Soda Stream and I love putting in a bottle of still water and turning the carbonation up to hell.

I also like soda with hard alcohol, fresh fruit, juice, etc. and it’s so great that it tastes fresh from our water. But juice, I think, is one of the worst things for you on the planet if you’re not drinking the kind sweetened with Splenda. You can ask your doctor if they think Splenda is bad for your child, but what you cannot ignore is that all juice is mostly sugar.

Just like restaurant food is mostly animal fat and butter. You get to choose whether you want that rich a meal, and also if way more fat is worse than way more sugar.

I would also rather eat my daily allowance of calories than drink it. So, that’s why I drink diet soda or the drink mixes you add to water bottles. When I drink alcoholic drinks, I tend to use seltzer as a mixer, and even with non-alcoholic beer, you have to be careful. They’re sometimes less calories than a real beer…. sometimes not.

My current favorite drink mixes are an import from Mexico and it’s only, like 10 bucks for 44 drinks…. take that, SODA. They’re sugar free aguafrescas. Both the lime and the piña colada flavors blow me away, because they’re not really sweet. The lime tastes like the real limonada you’d buy on the street in Enseñada…. and yet, not as good as Sunkist Lime, tbh. The piña colada tastes like real coconut water and a little bit of pineapple. It feels like being in Mexico 16 oz at a time. I have such fond memories.

Plus, other countries have laws around dyes that we do not. What I have noticed is that Mexican drink colors are not loud. Given my 7th grade science project, I believe this is for the best.

And through all of this, you may be wondering why I’m changing topics a lot. It’s that in my entries, I’m a gardener. I don’t pick and choose what’s important to say and what’s not. The plot reveals itself, I cannot predict what it will be because in order for the writing to change, I do. I start at a subject that’s not too deep and dig down until I feel comfortable enough to let go.

And now we’ve arrived at that moment, what I’ve avoided saying for almost a hundred paragraphs now. One of the biggest roots of my trauma, my first case of PTSD, was walking into my room and seeing my precious first computer melted and mangled into my desk. I’m autistic, always have been, and computers are one of my special interests.

Given the way that I use the internet for writing now, you can only imagine how much I lost in terms of text documents….. and I saved everything on hard drives and floppies, but of course I didn’t have any on me. They couldn’t have been, because I had to rush out of the house too quickly to grab anything, because my room/office was already full of smoke.

The bad thing from that time was twofold. The first is that scanners hadn’t been invented yet, nor e-mail (outside of the military), so there were no pictures to save that way. The second is that I didn’t think of my files as important back then. Apparently, I didn’t think pictures were important, either, which happens when it’s the choice between saving memories and black smoke chasing you down the hallway. I did not see anything burn.

The fire started in the attic, so of course I smelled the smoke, but luckily I do not have any trauma of actual flame.

I think that’s why the image of my first computer is burned into my brain. In the moment, I did not have time to take in the horror, and I was all alone. My mom and Lindsay were shopping. My dad was delivering communion to the shut-ins. I called the fire department from my next door neighbor’s house dressed in Snoopy pajamas, black pantyhose, and heels. This is because I was getting ready for my first church dance. I was wearing the nightgown until my hair and makeup were done, so I was also sporting hot curlers.

I got to make up for that missed dance later, and even met someone I really liked… but it was just a sweet crush on both ends because he was a little bit older. It was the type relationship where we realized we would have been good together, but the timing was off.

That was an excellent night because it took me a while to get over being the only one who knew our house was burning down for a while. In fact, my mother drove up to the house surrounded by police, fire, ambulance, the whole bit and thought I was dead.

It was a very good moment when she realized I was standing right there in the neighbor’s yard, still having nothing to change into, but she knew why. She was the one that was going to help me with my hair. The worst part is that it was December and I didn’t have a hoodie. The best part is that it was NE Texas, so it was still 50-55 degrees. Uncomfortable, but not unbearable.

That fire was so memorable that it literally appeared in the Naples paper for 30 years under “On This Day” (Dec. 20th). I believe that’s because it affected the church just as much as it did us.

In those days, less so now, you moved from parsonage to parsonage instead of buying your own house. Because of the housing market and ministers retiring without many assets (nor a place to live), the UMC started giving people living allowances separately from their salaries so they could work their own way up in real estate and have a place to retire.

I am sure that it was difficult for the church in that moment, realizing that they needed to rebuild an entire house. I never got to see it. We rented until we moved to Houston. My friends John and Linda have told me it’s beautiful. I believe it. It was the most majestic house on its street before.

From what I have heard, they just took it down to the studs, because the outside was fine. It relieves me because my favorite thing about the house were the Greek columns out front. It was the best house ever, and looked above a minister’s station in life even before it burned. But we drove old cars. There were no BMWs to match the vibe.

I do believe that it was easier to buy a parsonage that large and beautiful because it was bought in Naples, Texas. In DC, that house would be worth a quarter of a million dollars, especially because of our big front and back yards.

In DC, you’re lucky if your yard is bigger than a postage stamp.

I can say now that living in Galveston and Naples were some of the best years of my life, because I was young enough that things weren’t complicated….. except for being physically weak and mentally strong. The kind of thoughts that you’re hearing stream-of-consciousness now are the same way I processed emotions as a child.

Which is “try to take up the least amount of space possible and maybe no one will notice how weird you really are.” Here’s a for-instance, and it does have to do with computers.

I went on an interview in Portland once where I was going to be a contractor, not a full-time employee. The representative from the agency who got me the contract was trying to give me a “pep talk” before the interview and said, “I think when you walk in, you should announce the problem you have with your eyes because it’s noticeable enough to be distracting and you could make everyone uncomfortable.” When I told Lindsay about this yesterday, she wanted names and numbers.

She was going to sue the pants off this guy until I told her that it wasn’t recent enough, so I don’t remember the name, nor the agency.

Funny enough, I walked in and owned the room. I got the job in 25 minutes. However, the employment agency would not let up on me about my disabilities and “making other people uncomfortable,” so I fired myself and moved on to a better fit at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU).

We lost our funding for that project, so that’s when I moved to cooking. Dana was having a blast and I couldn’t stand being in an office anymore. I wasn’t the best cook, but I’m not the best office employee, either. In fact, I’m a much worse office employee.

I understand chefs because I’m autistic and they’re direct. I don’t understand bosses and HR-speak, and I don’t mean it like I don’t understand telling an employee to fuck off in the middle of a meeting will probably land me in hot water.

I mean that I don’t understand the things that go on behind closed doors, the way the bosses talk about me, and how I interact with coworkers because they’re trained to bullshit around everything.

I know that a lot of people don’t know what it means to “synergize,” but I don’t understand the difference between overperforming and underperforming because so much of it is calculated on your behavior and attitude whether your bosses/coworkers’ impressions of you are correct.

I understood it better at ExxonMobil and Alert Logic, because ExxonMobil ranked you and you got “grades.” Alert Logic displayed metrics in front of all of us so we knew how we were doing. It was uncomplicated because it was based on numbers and achievement, not (always) nebulous office politics.

At Alert Logic, though, I found my people. Other linux geeks like me. At ExxonMobil, I was stuck with a very large amount of STEM autistic geniuses, and because I’m creative autistic, let’s just say *our quirks didn’t line up.” That’s because not everyone was autistic, but everyone treated me like their personal secretary when I was actually IT support.

Why yes, I have printed out e-mails for people because they wouldn’t read them on the screen. Thanks for asking.

The one time I genuinely offended someone was when I told her what a simple fix it was for her audio problem. I meant it as “no big deal,” she took it as “you’re stupid.” What happened was that she was trying to play something from her iPhone, and she couldn’t get the aux cable to connect. She thought it was an IT problem, so she called us and I responded.

When I got there, the audio was fine. The case was preventing the audio cable from going all the way into the phone. So, I told her that all she had to do was remove the case and she’d be good to go. It embarrassed me in front of everyone when she said, “you didn’t have to say that part so loud….” and looked butt hurt.

I don’t like my job when people think I’m actively trying to make them look stupid. I save all that for when the day is over and I’m blowing off steam.

It was a lot of fun sitting around with my linux homies to set us apart from users, and regale each other over the calls we’d gotten that day.

In those days, we got a lot of calls about floppy disks, and we had to tell them, “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. Your work is gone. You didn’t save it on a hard drive as well.”

Two reasons for this. The first is that floppies were not that stable to begin with. It’s what happens when you have a tiny drive with magnets in it and only a thin layer of plastic to protect it.

The second is that people discovered that the side of the computer was the same material as the side of a refrigerator, and hard drives worked the same way, except metal surrounding the drive instead of plastic. So, they’d stick the floppy onto the side of their computer and it would erase the floppy so hard you couldn’t even retrieve the file structure, much less “final_final_final_paper.doc.”

If you put the floppy close to the hard drive, then the magnet would interfere with it as well. Remember I worked as the lab supervisor at the largest computer lab on campus, then the next year was promoted to supervising the smaller lab in the Graduate School of Social work all by myself. Therefore, I cannot tell you how many students I’ve had where I felt like I had to stop them from not contemplating suicide over it.

As an aside, USB flash drives are more stable than floppies, but I only think of them as “transport media.” As in, I work on my desktop and transfer files over that I’m taking to someone else. I don’t use it as permanent storage except for on laptops and tablets that have microSD slots.

If I had to sum up my love of Android tablets in two words, it’s “MicroSD slots.” The Ten Commandments stone tablets will have an expansion card slot before the iPhone, and even the newest Samsung phones don’t have them for the same reason. If you need more storage, they’re going to charge you an arm and a leg for it by having the storage soldered onto the motherboard. You can’t get a 32GB phone and add a one terabyte card anymore. Apparently that is now reserved for tablets only.

The best thing is that Android .mp3 players are the same way. My little Sansa Clip can hold a 512 GB card, and what that means is that I can either have every album ever made, or a smaller library in lossless quality….. for instance, copying the .wav file on a CD directly to your SD card is going to take up way more space than even the highest quality .mp3. But on a large expansion card, you can do that.

Because Apple did the same thing with iPods that it does with phones now. No expansion slot. If you wanted more storage, it was more expensive. I think the plan was to go to phones in the first place. The iPods were the equivalent of Microsoft Solitaire and Minesweeper.

Those games were not included with Windows as fun. I mean, they were, but that’s not the point. The games were included so that you’d be interested enough to learn how to use the mouse.

You learned the interface on an iPod Touch that would connect to wi-fi, so that when SIM cards were added, it wouldn’t feel different. Everything that used to be in iPod Touch is on the iPhone now, and again, no actual room for your music collection unless you’re willing to pay premium dollars. Even on the iPhone Mini 12, which I still carry because of its size (the form factor was not popular and they don’t make them anymore), the cost difference depending on disk space was enormous.

Meanwhile, you can add an expansion card to a tablet in two different ways. The first is that it will be formatted in a way that other computers can read, so you can take the card out and plug it into your desktop, etc. The second is that it will format as a virtual hard drive which doesn’t leave that tablet. The difference is that with the card integrated into your tablet, it doesn’t see the difference between one drive and the other, so you can install apps easier, because if you run out of space on your tablet, it will start installing apps to the card flawlessly without you having to move things over manually…. and honestly, only some apps can run disks formatted to be portable storage because they’re integrated into the operating system. I think the last time I did it, I used App2SD or something like that, and it would tell you which apps could be moved and which couldn’t.

Now you can skip the middle man.

I have a 128 GB expansion card on my HD Fire because I don’t have to want to be dependent on my internet connection. I will always download movies from Netflix, Amazon, etc. rather than streaming them because I might start them at home and finish on the train.

Again, wandering off into nowhere because it’s easier than wandering into everywhere pain lives.

Like seeing my very first computer melted into my desk.