My brain has been scrambled and fried since I lost my mother. This is the first time in a very long time that I’ve been on an “up,” hypomania that allows me four hours of sleep a night, if that. The flip side is that I am very productive during these hours, so it is not all bad. It’s kind of like a superpower that I don’t know when or if will come. Most of the time, my Bipolar II presents as a down with very few ups. I do not cycle more than a few days a month, and sometimes I skip it entirely. I do not know whether this is my natural cycle, or if my medication helps (sarcasm because downs are sometimes intolerable). But I do know that when I swing upward, I am happier. It feels good to be productive, to want to go outside, to want to live life to the fullest rather than sitting in my room hoping that something will happen.

It will make me feel a lot better about being in a huge crowd this weekend at the Women’s March. I haven’t decided who I’m going with, because I might go with the UCC, and I might go with my friends. They’re trying to decide if they want to march with another group, or if they want to get their own group together. However, if I go with the UCC, it’s not like I won’t be with friends. I don’t know who from our church will be there, but I’m guessing Matt will, and that is enough. I am greatly hoping that men do not feel excluded from marching for women’s rights, because some of the best feminists I know are male UCC ministers.

It comes from an example that Jesus taught in one story about Martha and Mary. Martha gets hacked off that she’s doing all the cooking and cleaning (as Larry Gipson once said, churches love Marthas… not the hacked off part, but those that see cooking and cleaning as ministry, because it is). But Mary wanted to sit at Jesus’ feet with the rest of the Disciples and listen to what was being said, and Jesus welcomed her, even though in that time and place it Was. Not. Done. Jesus’ feminist example has echoed through time as Christianity has become more and more progressive, although there are still pockets where women are not allowed to preach, being “relegated” to Sunday school teachers because that is what’s seen as women’s work. I recognize that teaching children is perhaps even greater than preaching to the masses, but it is also an incredible glass ceiling (*squints hard at Fundamentalists*).

However, society will leave them behind, and that version of Christianity must change or die.

I have my own feelings about becoming the kind of person God has asked me to be, because sometimes I feel entirely unworthy, and at others, I know that unworthiness is unwarranted because no one in the Bible that Jesus ever called in the New Testament, or God called in the Old, was ever the type person you’d expect to wear the mantle. My saving grace is that I keep working on myself so that I am becoming a vessel instead of focusing on the parts of my heart that have turned black and need cleansing, because I am realizing one day at a time that those black spots can be cleaned with hard work. I have a long and interesting history of being emotionally messed up, and it is my goal before I am finished with grad school to be able to work without passing on my flaws to others.

It is already beginning, but there is a staircase, and I am somewhere in the middle of it, ever climbing toward the top. Perhaps it is Jacob’s Ladder, and perhaps I am building my own spiral. I can promise you that the pericope of Jacob wrestling with the angel resonates with me deeply, and in some ways, my emotional “stuff” to deal with are where God has touched my hip. I can only hope to heal the limp… Ironic only because my sciatica is a constant reminder physically of the road forward in therapy.

Every day, I make a choice to leave my past behind, or to continue to ruminate about it, trying to figure out where and why I went wrong. It is the natural dance of intimacy, getting closer to finding my true self and alternately running away from it. I know that I have been running since I was a teenager, and now it is time to stop. I have an incredible wealth of resources at my disposal now that Vesta takes my insurance again. Perhaps today is the day I will go back, because I have to take advantage of the productivity while it lasts.

The rest of the time, I am content to sit at my computer and send out resumés, because that takes barely any energy at all. I have also sent out applications for things that make money, but don’t require a lot of brain power, like working at a grocery store. I don’t know that it will make me happy, but what I do know is that I can save my brain power for writing as opposed to being tethered to my laptop 24 hours a day. I am capable of that life, and have often done it, and what I have learned is that it keeps me busy enough that I don’t have time to think about where I am going and whether it is a direction or a distraction.

I will have time to think about it on vacation. I haven’t had a vacation in probably ten to fifteen years, and my father and my sister want me to meet them in Orlando to go to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. I have tried copycat recipes of butterbeer, and I am hoping that the real thing is better. I also hope they have a bar, because I would like to try a Firewhisky… even though I am very particular about whisky and scotch. Peat moss makes me gag, because the nose is what I call “Band-Aids,” or at least the smell when you used to have to open the old tins. So, my particular advice is to stay away from Islay. I am the type person that will try anything once, but in this case it did not work out in my favor.

And it’s not like I didn’t try the best of the best. My friend David bought me a shot of The Balvenie, so if you’re going to try peat flavored whisky, I started at the top. It just wasn’t my thing. I would rather have a Diet Coke.

I’m excited about going to the park(s), and will definitely bring my Chuy’s “Expecto Burrito” t-shirt. Speaking of which, my dad got me a gift certificate for Chuy’s for Christmas, and though I did have two meals, I spent most of it on t-shirts, because their design team is so fabulous. One has the fish with Walter White’s hat and sunglasses and says “Heisenchuy.” One says “Super Tex-Mex Brothers,” and is a recreation of Super Mario Brothers in 8-bit for the original NES.

Before I go, I want to get a pair of cargo pants, because even though they’re not in fashion anymore, I would prefer it to carrying a bag through the park, and my stuff would be kept safe with snaps and buttons on the pockets. I may also activate my old iPhone 5c(heap) for the trip, because my Samsung is *huge.* I’d look like I had a tumor. Actually, perhaps I’ll get them today because they’d be handy for the march on Saturday as well. If, God forbid, I get arrested, I’ll at least be comfortable while I’m waiting for my buds to bail me out. I can’t imagine that with 200-400 thousand people that it would happen, but stranger things have happened, and strange things tend to happen to me. I’m also planning on going to the Metro station to fill up my card so I won’t have to wait in line for the machines. The tourists alone, oy vey.

I really want to write more because we haven’t talked in a while, but I need to get moving. Possibly more later- we shall see.

Love you miss you mean it. 🙂

When I was in middle school, we got the call on the Saturday before a holiday that my mother’s father had died. My mother had a children’s choir program the next morning, so there was no way we could take off for Lone Star immediately, about a five and a half hour drive from Houston if you’re going the speed limit…….. My mother, instead of calling everyone and postponing the program (which everyone would have understood), got up like a champ and conducted the hell out of that program. It is one of the times that I remember her as a true hero, because she was able to put away her grief for a few hours, an impossible feat, and get it handled….. literally the Olivia Pope of choir directors.

I wish I could remember more specific details, like what the program entailed and whether my sister was a soloist (I think she was, actually, and that might have gone into her decision as well). But the take-home message is just how much my mother worked with grace under fire. Unlike my mother, my grandfather did not die suddenly. He’d been diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s Disease, the aggressive kind where it started with his throat muscles and worked down so that he could not eat without a feeding tube. Because of this, my grief was tempered, because I had a long time to process the situation… unlike my mother, who we learned from her autopsy that it was indeed an embolism that blew in her leg which killed her almost instantly.

Our family friend, Suzanne Wales, came to the funeral and played the piano, and accompanied me as I played Amazing Grace on my trumpet. As usual, I was calm during crisis with an immense delayed reaction. Perhaps I take after my mother more than I thought.

These memories are why I am praying for my choir director today. She has made the decision to show up and conduct despite receiving the news that her father died. Grace under fire just as my mother was all those years ago. We have bonded over losing our mothers recently, and knowing her is painful and cathartic. The only time I ever really cry at church anymore is when she is playing a piano solo, because she sounds so similar to my mother that it gets me every time.

Praying for her is my way of letting art flow through me, whether it’s hers, mine, or ours as a collective choir. There is nothing in the world that would keep me from church today, because I know her pain. I have seen it with my own eyes. I can only hope that my love for her shines in them, because on days like this, it’s important for her to see it. She has supported me beyond measure as I sing through my own grief and pain. Now it’s my turn to return that favor.

Please join me in prayer, all over the world, because the art of prayer is the thread of humanity that runs through us all, the art that sustains us through good wishes for others in their distress. I know I have felt all sorts of energy from the rest of the globe, from the UK to Australia to Romania to Africa to Scandinavia. All I ask today is that you send it her way, too.

Amen.
#prayingonthespaces

I didn’t fall asleep until about 0400 because I made the mistake of watching Snowden at 2100. I thought I didn’t care about privacy because I didn’t have any, anyway (I’ve had a wallet stolen and Dana accidentally gave my passport to Goodwill). However, this was beyond my wildest dreams in terms of the power of the NSA/CIA/DIA/etc. As you can tell by the time of this posting [Editor’s Note: I started writing at 0830.], it didn’t take long before I woke back up just as freaked. If there’s anything that the movie points out, it’s that just because something is ruled illegal doesn’t mean that the intelligence community won’t do it, anyway. I’m not worried about access to my Facebook account- it’s all public, anyway. But access to every e-mail I’ve ever written, my phone, and my web cams on both my laptop and desktop? I am doing my best to remain in chill mode, because I have been sure since the Internet became mainstream that I didn’t have private information anymore. I just had information. But there’s one scene where the NSA is watching a Muslim woman and she starts to take off her clothes and they don’t not watch, because they’ve activated her web cam from their SCIF (Secure Contained Information Facility). The scariest part is that this could be dramatization for a movie, or it could be exactly the type behavior that Snowden was trying to highlight. The things that Snowden told the public were being fought internally, and nothing changed. I can’t necessarily support “telling family secrets,” and I can’t decide if I am better off for having seen the movie or not.

Because it’s Oliver Stone, there are real news clips mixed in with the dramatization, and I can’t recommend it highly enough as a good movie. I can promise that the issues it presents are complicated and there’s no easy answer. I have friends on both sides of the aisle, those that think he’s a traitor and a hero. I don’t know what the hell to think. I am able to see both sides of the equation, and just how involved the dialogue must be. Thus, my sleep last night was mostly reduced to sneezing and my eyes closed for a second. Who knows if I am a third or fourth connection to someone that deserves to be watched? How would I even know? I am glad that I am taking anti-anxiety medication, because even if I can’t turn off my brain about this, I’m not having any physical reactions to it. When the credits rolled, though, I was nauseous. By then, my medication had worn off and I couldn’t take any more until this morning. I have to be really careful with the clonazepam, because overuse tends to cause addiction and that is the last rabbit hole I need in my life. It would be easy to accomplish given the amount of stress and grief I’ve been under lately. Even with my mother dying, I still managed to get my savings to last until recently, because I greatly underestimated the time it would take me to get a job. Being a freelancer helps, but it’s not enough. The best I’m doing is expanding my network in hopes of meeting someone that can point me in the right direction.

It’s the same in terms of working for the church as a volunteer. It may also lead to something paid because on the social communications committee, I’m meeting other people who do what I do, which for the church is responsible, measured responses and in my own life, whoring my dirty laundry for money (explain your job badly). But the thing is, I don’t write for anyone else but me. If money comes from it, it’s a blessing, but it is not in any way necessary. Although I have to say that my favorite donation came from a woman who said you must have custom fonts. At the time, my reaction was you get me. You really, really get me. 😛

This is because any money that comes through goes right to WordPress.com and professional development. So far, I’ve been able to upgrade to the pro version of WordPress and get a subscription to LinuxJobber.com. Speaking of which, I need to create a CentOS virtual machine… more of a reminder to myself than telling you about it. That’s just an added bonus to hold me accountable. Although, wait. I don’t have to install anything on my local hard drive, because I can get a free VM in the cloud thanks to LinuxJobber and Amazon Web Services. It would just be nice to be able to learn stuff when I’m offline. It doesn’t happen often, but if my internet goes down, I’m not SOL, either.

This won’t make a lot of sense to non-computer people, but my computer has this inane thing where access to the extensions that make it possible to run a 64-bit guest operating system are soft-coded into the BIOS, and I Googled it, and there should be a BIOS update that fixes it, but so far, all of the BIOS updates I’ve downloaded haven’t included that one feature I really need. However, my computer is fast enough and has enough RAM that I can run a 32-bit guest operating system, and I have. Right now I’m running Windows 10 and can’t decide if I want to dual boot or just install VirtualBox. I had to switch back to Windows when my wireless adapter didn’t work natively in Linux and I have to install the Windows XP driver to get it to work, which reduces my download speeds to absolute shit. In order to properly use my internet connection in Linux, I have to tether my Android, which comes with two problems. The first is that I can’t use file transfer and tethering at the same time. The second is that there’s a large chance I could burn out my phone battery from keeping it plugged in so long. My laptop is fully capable of running multiple operating systems with VirtualBox, but I took it to the church so they wouldn’t have to provide a computer for me, and I got a refurbished desktop for Christmas, which is why I had to add USB wireless in the first place. Overall, I am extremely happy with it. Windows 10 doesn’t suck, and I’ve missed Fallout 3. The second is that the browser plugins are just better… I can use any browser for anything, which is important because I switch between Chrome and Firefox *a lot.*

It is shameful for me to admit this. It really is. However, if I upgrade to the Anniversary edition of Windows, I can install BASH, which won’t mean anything to you except that I’ll have a linux shell inside a Windows environment, and can run all the applications I’ve come to know and love that don’t make an open source Windows version. The easiest solution would be to take my desktop to the church and bring my laptop home, but my desktop is much, much faster than my laptop and has 3x the RAM. Plus, in Linux, my printer works perfectly, but the scanner won’t work over wireless… and I think it is lazy and pointless to buy a printer cable.

The entire reason I got an Android was to work in Linux natively, and I am surprised that the one feature that doesn’t work in Windows that does work in Linux is the media transfer protocol. Nine times out of ten, when I plug it in, it won’t even show up as a drive so I can’t drag and drop my music and videos. Regardless, it has a lot of features that my iPhone wouldn’t even touch, like having a fingerprint reader that allows me to log into my phone, Bank of America, and LastPass. I feel that feature alone was worth the price, even though I didn’t pay it… it was a Christmas present, too. Although it was a deep discount to get a refurbished one and take it to AT&T rather than upgrading my phone there. It’s not the latest and greatest phone, but it is to me. The fact that iPhones do not have an expansion slot is crazy. Mine is 128 GB so that it will last for a while. I use Handbrake to convert my movies to Android size, and I have a habit of using a LARGE amount of space for podcasts so that I don’t have to stream them in the car. Handbrake is invaluable because it backs up encrypted DVDs and Blu-Rays, although I do not have a Blu-Ray drive in my desktop. Perhaps that is one of the next orders of business, but first is a TV card so that I can run my cable through Kodi and record my shows onto my 3TB external drive. Thank GOD it comes in a Windows version that is identical to the Linux version, because I would be lost without it. It doesn’t have plugins for Amazon, Netflix, and Hulu, but there are so many video addons I do use, and here’s a list:

• ABC Family (Freeform)
• Crackler
• TED Talks
• Syfy
• Travel Channel
• Geek & Sundry
• Linux Gamecast
• This Week in Tech
• PBS
• PBS Kids (even at 39, still addicted to WordGirl)
• WABC
• WCBS
• WNBC
• YouTube

There are also programs called “Scrapers” that will download the subtitles and movie posters for my movies, which makes the interface beautiful. The OTA channel plugins often post shows before Hulu, because they’re recorded live. I also really, really love the PBS plugin, because my favorite show in the entire world is Frontline. Second to that is Mercy Street, because most of it takes place in my old hood, Alexandria, VA… and if there is a third, it’s American Experience. With the Travel Channel plugin, I have access to No Reservations. The last episode I watched was Finland, because my favorite episode of NR is Iceland, where Tony basically bitches the entire time about the cold/food and it is seriously entertaining.

I was looking forward to more of that, but as it turns out, he liked Finland much better. I would totally move there in a heartbeat if I wasn’t tired of moving and I know I would be gobsmacked by the weather- considering even though it was a lot warmer in Portland, the constantly grey skies undid me. After ten years, it was time to come home, whether it was Houston or DC. I do like their approaches to education, health care, a living wage whether you have a job or not, and the fact that if I got pregnant, my baby could live in a cardboard box. Also, there’s one train that serves beer and wine so you can have one on your train ride home. What’s not to love except for the soul-crushing weather?

Plus, Linux was invented in Finland. How can I not love that? Although ironically, Linus Torvalds lives in Portland now.

In other news, I am meeting an old, old friend at SBUX this afternoon. She was in my 7th and 8th grade classes at Clifton, and now works as a journalist here. I’m excited because she introduced me to an organization working to mobilize Montgomery County in terms of calling Congressmen and just generally trying to decide what we’re going to do over the next 2-4 years. I have a sneaking suspicion that the Midterms are going to be exciting. The hardest part we face is that this area went blue, so in some ways, we are preaching to the choir.

If this organization is non-partisan, just trying to combat injustice rather than being a mouthpiece for the Democratic party, I want to include Matt and Christ Church to it… because this was not a typical election. Even some Republicans are terrified, because this is not about a Republican administration, but decency and humanity. I don’t think we’d be this outraged had someone like Mitt Romney or Jeb Bush won. They have their issues, but they have two things going for them. The first is that they are not batshit crazy. The second is that I doubt either would have turned the country into a theocracy, because gay marriage and abortion were settled by the Supreme Court, and I doubt either one would try to overturn those cases.

I agree with President Obama, though. If the Republicans can come up with a solution to health care that is actually better than the ACA, I will personally support it. I believe that chance is less than zero, though, and perhaps by a large margin. I am grateful that I am covered by state Medicaid, and even though that may be affected, too, it stands a better chance of existing than the federal Affordabe Care Act. Nicknaming it “Obamacare” is both excellent and terrible. It reminds people that POTUS was responsible for passing legislation that truly helped a lot of people… and mobilized Republicans to paint Obama as the anti-Christ for changing the way health care is handled in this country. Before I applied for Medicaid, I got a federal stipend of $250, which made my insurance 37 cents a month. I can easily afford it, but the truth is that Maryland’s Medicaid program provides so much more coverage for free. There’s no deductible, my doctor’s appointments are free, and my medication costs are reduced to a dollar a bottle. Any insurance I’ve ever gotten through work has never been that good. If, God forbid, I have to have surgery or something, I will not have to file for bankruptsy in the process due to co-pays. With surgery and major illnesses such as cancer or an autoimmune disease, co-pays go up to thousands of dollars.

I am a huge fan of single-payer, because it takes away the Golden Handcuffs. No one is stuck in a job they hate because COBRA is ridiculously expensive. Also, when I was working for Marylhurst University, because Dana and I weren’t married her insurance had to be taken out of my salary at full price, which was $600 a month. I gladly paid it because she needed it, but it was still a huge pain in the ass when my straight coworkers paid a tenth of that to add a dependent. Alert Logic was on point. I was able to add Dana, and even though it was taxable income, it was also a tenth of the price at MU.

Single-payer would have saved us a ton of money, although I am sure that’s been changed since national gay marriage is a thing…. for now. Right now, it pays to be single, because if I get a job, not adding a dependent will make my health insurance either free or greatly subsidized.

I am terrified of a Republican president and a Republican Congress all at once. There are no checks and balances on repealing the progress that has been made over the last eight years, and I’m glad that President Obama is remaining in DC until Sasha graduates, because it will enable him to campaign on a huge platform for the midterms.

I am also greatly disappointed that Merrick Garland and President Obama will not become Supreme Court justices, because especially with Obama, as a Constitutional Law professor, it’s a job he might have enjoyed even more than being President. I’m not sure that he even wanted to be nominated, but at the same time, I don’t think it is any less true that he would have made an incredible “Supreme.”

I’m also incredibly disappointed that Ben Carson is such an idiot, because I think it would be interesting at this time in our lives to have an MD in The White House. But Carson seems to have gotten his medical degree from Bob’s College of Medicine & BBQ Pit. If Tiffany Anthony ever had any interest in becoming President, I’d vote for her in a heartbeat (see what I did there?). It also wouldn’t hurt to have a doctor on the Supreme Court… because there are no qualifications for being a Justice. It is traditional for them to be lawyers, but that’s just precedent. Anyone can be appointed if they make it through the vetting process, because in the Constitution, they are literally just Nine Guys in Robes (thanks to Ken Wall for that description). I’m not even sure that you have to have any degrees if you are smart enough.

It’s interesting to think of me getting a government job right now, because I am sure I would be a part of the rebellion that is starting as we speak, especially if I was a White Hat hacker, able to discover vulnerabilities and find SQL injections, rootkits, etc. Rootkits are of the devil, because you can actually overwrite memory as they’re working, so you can’t even see the running process. I am just not a math and science brain. I can teach someone how to use a computer and offer incredible tech support, but I am not the type person to whom programming/reverse engineering comes easily. However, maybe that wouldn’t matter in this administration. If Trump is any indication, I am qualified for any job. Any of them.

If I had aspirations in that area, it would be to work for “No Such Agency,” the only government institution that cares enough to listen. #tshirtwisdom I’ve seen it in two places. The first is the gift shop near Old Ebbitt Grill, and the second is at the Spy Museum. Especially after watching Snowden, it may go on my birthday list.

I do have a CIA baseball cap because my great uncle was a badass hero before I was born. However, I don’t wear it a lot because even though it’s just a tourist gimmick, I’ve noticed that other people look at me suspiciously, as if the CIA actually advertises. The rules for being in the intelligence community are roughly the same as Fight Club. The second is that it is black, and gathers all kinds of dust bunnies and dog hair, and I haven’t managed to get it clean in years.

And on that note, it’s time to get ready to meet “Ace.” I’m looking forward to sitting at the “cool kids’ table.” I finally think I’m worthy of it… and to be honest, it is exciting to think about my future in social justice rather than the grief that is threatening to undo me every single day. My mother would be so proud.

#beastmode engaged.

There’s really nothing better than waking up to the first snow of the season. It’s still exciting, you know, before it gets dirty, repetitive, and repetitive. The picture is through my window on the second floor, and I’m sure it would look better without the screen… I’m just not dumb enough to go outside without bundling up until I look like a queen-sized bed. I hear that if I don’t do that, I’ll eventually acclimate to the cold. I tried that in Oregon. It did not work.

I actually do have enough layers to make myself comfortable if I decide to venture out, but for right now, I am comfortable at my desk, just watching what may come. Capital Weather Gang  (they have a great Twitter feed, BTW) is predicting that it’s not over yet, but I’ll be surprised if we get the same unholy dump we got last year. In some areas, it was between a foot and 18 inches. I, however, have been known to be wrong. When I first moved to DC in April of 2015, there were still small patches of snow on the ground. It may not be that the first snow is heinous, but another storm to be determined later. That’s the thing about living on the east coast- it gets just as hot as Houston in the summer, but our winters last a lot longer.

I do a fair amount of complaining about the cold, but the truth is that I prefer it. I can always put on more layers, but in 100 degree heat, I’d have to be indecent before I was comfortable. But hey, no tan lines. #smallblessings

Right now I am listening to dogs barking with absolute delight as they play in the fluff… or at least, the big dogs are happy (Lincoln is a pit bull, Daisy is a BBD [Basic Black Dog, about 40lbs]. We have two Pomeranians (Sadie and Pixie) who are Just. Not. Impressed. I am imagining that their inner monologue runs thusly…. Peeing in the snow is FROWNED UPON IN THIS ESTABLISHMENT. I don’t blame them. I shiver violently just taking off my layers to get in the shower.

Because of this, I don’t shower that often. The winter is drying to my skin, so it’s not like it’s necessary, anyway. I guarantee that I am not doing any sweating, and I rarely put product in my hair because it’s so cold I have to wear a hat.

Sometimes I wear my Rice baseball cap, but most of the time I look like a hippy douche with one of those knit hats that look like it should have come with a bottle of patchouli oil and some sandalwood soap (not that there’s anything wrong with that…. chill, Portland).

As for bundling up, I’m set in terms of groceries, so the biggest decision I have to make today is what movie I’m going to watch, holding my soda with gloves on because it’s cold enough. If I get industrious, I may go out and take pictures… but that would involve putting on real pants, so don’t hold your breath. My electric blanket is heating up, and once I get under it, an Act of God wouldn’t get me to move.

Perhaps I’ll take pictures when I’m required to leave the house, like walking to choir practice. In the time it takes to scrape the windshield and get the defroster working, I could be there already.

Tomorrow’s service centers around the baptism of Christ, wading in the water… however, Christ never mentioned what to do if the water was frozen…. walk on top of it, I guess.

Everyone in my family contributed pictures for the slideshow that played during my mother’s visitation at Clayton Funeral home. My stepfather, Forbes, sent me a DVD, but I have a habit of losing them and this was too important not to back up to my own drives and the web. Even if you didn’t know my mother, I think you’ll enjoy it… especially if you want to see embarrassing pictures of me as a child.

The one thing I want to point out is that the background music is comprised of piano solos, but my mother is not the soloist. It’s kind of eerie how well her style is captured, though. It makes me wish I had more recordings of her, and perhaps my grandparents have some. My father’s father has a huge repository of family video and audio. In fact, I’m fairly certain that some of the pictures in this slideshow originally came from their house, because our parsonage burned down when I was 11, and it was “Nanny & Paw-Paw” that came to our rescue in terms of all the photos we lost.

My favorite pictures in the set are watching my mother prepare for me, her firstborn, and she never missed a chance to call me that to my face. I don’t think that parents actually have a favorite, but I do think I had a special place in her heart because I was the first to call her “Mom.”

I wish I could tell you why I’ve had no energy for writing lately. I’ve written a few things in Word documents meant to be published later, but when I went back and read them, I didn’t like them. They were mostly about the New Year’s Eve party I went to and just meandered off into nothing… not that I haven’t done that before, but looking at it with fresh eyes convinced me that I needed the “Post” button to keep myself from doubting what I was about to put out there. Web sites that remain static do not get traffic, but at this point, I’m not worried about it. I’ve needed time to reorient and get with the program, and you may see more content and you may not. Writing is such a personal thing, and I have to have a life to write about it.

I got invited to two New Year’s Eve parties, actually, but I decided to stay on this side of the river rather than going down to the Alexandria waterfront, because that would have meant a 40 minute trip home with a bunch of drunks wandering down GW Parkway and 495. Besides, not only was it New Year’s Eve, it was also Ingrid’s birthday party. We toasted with sips of champagne at both 8:34 PM AND midnight. It made me feel all warm inside, especially since we were sitting outside by a campfire, just talking and joking. It was the best of both worlds… a huge party raging inside with just a small, intimate group outside. So, even though it was cold, I preferred sitting with the small group and making each other laugh than wandering around the house trying to find people I knew.

One of the people I know from choir told me a little bit about her life in the theater. She was backstage tech before she retired, and her biggest story was meeting James Earl Jones before Star Wars. As you can imagine, I was totally down with that. She really wants to spend some time with me, so I imagine that there will be outings in our future, and I am trying hard not to be the anxious spazzbasket I’ve become in terms of wanting to get out of the house and make friends.

Leslie #1 and her husband, David, were also there (everyone in the choir was invited), which alleviated my party anxiety greatly. Leslie is a judge, and for a while she worked out of town and I was not in the choir. So I sat with David and my nickname became “Substitute Leslie.” They asked me what got me back in the choir, and I said, “the chairs.” I got a big laugh over that one because everyone knows that our pews are hard backed and force you to sit up straight as if you’re attending a service in Amish country.

I have mentioned this before, but I have a corkscrew scoliosis in my back that make it almost impossible for me to sit up straight without pain, both in my back and radiating down the nerves in my legs, especially in those pews because the back of them hits the knot in my spine. Once I get approved for Maryland Health Connection, one of my first orders of business is to see if acupuncture and chiropractic services are covered. If they’re not, I’ll go and hit both of them up once I’m making my own money again. Angela the Med & my dad looked at my back years ago, and told me I’d probably have to have surgery on it in my 60s, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have options if surgery is out of the picture until then…. it’s only 20 years away now. I’ve waited longer for other things. Piece of cake.

I also need to get back to Vesta, because when I transitioned to insurance at DSI, they didn’t take it. I lost Leighton as my nurse practitioner and Sarah as my therapist, who are both probably wondering why I never came back… and not for lack of trying. They were the first people who believed in me, that I didn’t have to explain over and over that I wasn’t being catfished and that Argo was a real person with real feelings that never just tried to fuck with me for the hell of it… probably because I never used her real name in therapy and they thought I didn’t know it… that she was a screen name and not someone with whom I’d actually connected. However, this was in my intake evaluation at Montgomery County, and I can’t help but feel that they might have mixed me up with someone who had schizophrenia or something. They see all sorts of crazy in that place, so I can’t say I blame them. I am sure it was an honest mistake, but I was hacked off that they were listening to reply and not listening to hear me. As far as Bipolar II goes, I have a relatively mild case, my hypomania presenting with insomnia and not much else. However, what I didn’t know is that my anxiety was so bad that I needed medication for it, and once those meds were added to my protocol, it opened me up to a world in which I could function when I wasn’t “on a down.”

Argo and I both got into heated arguments, but there was never a time in which I didn’t feel like I needed her friendship, even though it has never extended past e-mail. As you can imagine, as a writer, words on a page are sacred, and reached me in a lot of ways that in-person conversations never would’ve, because it would have taken so much longer for me to open up. My favorite conversation on the subject happened between Dana and me:

Leslie: One of the reasons that Argo is so sacred to me is that when I’m writing to her, it feels like I am entering my God space, and though I can’t know if God is listening, I know that she is.

Dana, with tears in her eyes: Go tell her. Right now.

Having someone listen to my feelings at a time when I really needed it was a life raft of enormous proportions, and I miss that day-to-day of alternately deep conversation and laughter that made me double over.

That being said, my biggest mistake in that relationship (and I made a metric fuck tonne) was not realizing sooner that although she could listen to me with an unbiased ear, she also wasn’t trained in dealing with mental illness and I needed a professional. I can’t help but wonder what might have happened had I had that AHA! moment sooner, but I’ve stopped beating myself up over it (most days- it’s a deep scar).

It also might have calmed Dana’s fears that those teenage butterflies I felt over the dopamine rush of meeting someone too cool for school, because with a professional, it might have happened on her timeline rather than mine. Moreover, it might have stopped the emotional hand grenades she threw at me by using Argo for her own purposes to try and get every fight to devolve from our own problems into the “threat” Argo was to her. Argo was never a threat. It was all my own stuff to deal with after opening the Pandora’s Box of emotional abuse and trying to figure out which end was up.

I literally felt like I was being yanked by my stomach into a different and frightening world, because everything I thought I knew was upended into catastrophe. I couldn’t stop beating myself up for everything I didn’t know, or in my mind, wasn’t smart enough to figure out. I started to forgive myself when I realized I was just a child at the time, reinforced by the fact that my eighth grade history teacher saw it and didn’t know what to do. She told me that she has carried guilt over that fact for over 20 years, and I hope I have done my best to release her from it, because at the time, I never would have talked to her about anything at any time. As the “enabler,” you always protect the path, and she knew members of my congregation at St. Mark’s and even though chances are it never would have made it back to them, I couldn’t bring myself to open up even if the odds were one in a million. So, even though I was a child and Diane was an adult, I still take responsibility for the choice I made not to talk, and it wasn’t and never will be her fault…. because there were plenty of people trying to get me to say something, and I ran away from all of them, not just my teacher…. for two reasons. The first is that because the abuse was psychosexual/emotional and not physical, it didn’t feel real. The second is that because Diane is a lesbian, I just thought that the adults around me were pushing their homophobic agenda and not trying to protect me.

Even leaving the psychosexual abuse part out of it, the emotional abuse was intense and powerful, because she was sharing secrets with me that had no business being passed from an adult to a child.

I also take responsibility for the choices I made once I was an adult, because the statute of limitations had run out and I still didn’t get a therapist and try to resolve both the boiling rage and the intense sadness I felt over the situation. I forgive, but do not forget the e-mail I wrote her detailing what had been done to me, and she offered to come to a therapy session with me, taking it back almost immediately. She wanted me to talk to her partner, Susan, instead.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that Susan was not listening with an unbiased ear, didn’t believe a word I said, and defended Diane to the death. To add insult to injury, I wrote to Diane after the meeting, and she said that Susan’s feelings on the subject were not an accurate representation of hers. My e-mail back only said WHICH IS WHY YOU SHOULD HAVE TALKED TO ME YOURSELF. I felt betrayed because I’d known Diane almost twice as long as Susan, and there was no way that Susan ever could have understood the issues between Diane and me because she wasn’t there. Susan had me pegged as this Single White Female character who was just coming to Portland to steal Diane’s life and friends… as if Diane had never written to me and said she thought it was a good idea to move there when I turned 18 so I could get out of the Bible Belt and later, when I came to visit, told me I looked really happy in Portland and perhaps I should look for a job. She introduced me to a whole host of people, some of whom I talk with regularly to this day.

I didn’t just make my own friends, I made my own urban family. The worst part was when we were in the middle of a sushi restaurant, Diane crying her eyes out because I’d made my own choice to marry Dana (or as close as we could get with a domestic partnership), as if making this choice had anything to do with her. She got on board eventually, but it was a rough haul, because I really didn’t understand why she was so upset. If I had to make a guess, it was twofold. The first is that she really didn’t know Dana that well and didn’t see everything I saw in her. The second is that I didn’t have a big church wedding where she was invited.

However, that was never the plan. The plan was to separate out the legal aspects of our relationship and have a holy ceremony later, because our parents were so far away that we wanted to be the people who made life decisions for each other because if something serious happened, there was no way our families could get there in time, especially Dana’s, because IAD to PDX is a long damn flight…. even further than the four hours and 23 minutes it would have taken for my parents to arrive. There was also the possibility that Dana’s parents, because they did not support our relationship, would try to pull rank over me and Dana wouldn’t have gotten what she told me she needed and wanted, so we both felt we needed protection from it.

By the time Dana asked our priest to marry us, it was long after we’d worked out our legal obligations to each other and I wouldn’t have wanted Diane there, anyway. She made it clear that she was free to drop in and out of my life at will, but if I emoted in kind, she ran like a house on fire.

But those feelings aside, I had enormous fears about getting married in a church, because when I was growing up, being gay was still seen as a mental illness all its own, and all that internalized homophobia had to go somewhere. The Episcopal Church USA grew up, and I didn’t necessarily grow with it. My little kid attitude (after having come out to some people at 13 and the rest at 17) has stayed with me, even, in some ways, to this day. After Dana talked to our priest, I wrote to Argo and told her that even though I wanted to marry Dana, my thought process was what if I planned a wedding and nobody came? It wasn’t reality, but it was real to me.

I had to let go of a lot of anger that Dana talked to our priest without me, and it wasn’t a decision we made together…. mostly because Dana didn’t seem to have the internal Southern conservative views of which I was terrified…. or maybe she did, and was just much stronger than I was… a definite possibility.

In Houston, I was affectionate with her, but looked over my shoulder on every street to make sure we were in a safe neighborhood to do so. I, for instance, had no qualms about it in The Montrose, but outside of it, I am ashamed to say that my thought process sometimes where Dana was concerned was could you not be quite so gay? To say that I had a lot of issues that needed to be worked out in that area is an understatement.

It’s one of the reasons I love living in DC/Maryland. While Virginia still has its issues the further you get toward Richmond and beyond, I never have to look over my shoulder here, because the area is overwhelmingly liberal and supportive of gay rights. Even in 2001, before Kathleen and I separated, we thought about moving to Maryland for just that reason. Although, if I’m honest, I didn’t get a civil union in Vermont with Kathleen for love. I didn’t need a piece of paper to tell me that I wanted to love her for the rest of my life. I needed a piece of paper because a PR spokesman for ExxonMobil told the Washington Blade that for gay couples who had legal proof of their union, they would honor it in terms of benefits.

I honestly don’t think they expected anyone to take them up on it, because we were the first couple that applied, and even though the PR spokesman had said the thing about benefits on the record, XOM hadn’t actually made a policy for it…. so they wrote one just for us. We worked with HR for about a month before the health insurance went through, but it’s an experience I’ll never forget…. being the “poster children” for a notoriously conservative company and living to tell about it. I have also often wondered if that PR guy got to keep his job, because when we e-mailed a digital copy of our civil union certificate to HR, they had no idea what we were talking about. We did, however, make a ton of friends that way because we didn’t know that XOM had a GLBT group on the downlow and all of the sudden, we were heroes. I can only hope that in the 15 years since I left that it’s not on the downlow anymore.

I did get some blowback from it, though. I was a blogger on a different server, and one of the conservative engineers in my group (I worked for the Marine, Civil, Safety, and Technology division at ExxonMobil Research & Engineering, or EMRE) started leaving these nasty comments on my entries, and my boss read them, always having my back.

I’ve always had plenty of people who’ve had my back, and it’s only now that I’m learning to have my own. I come by it honestly, but that does not mean there isn’t room for growth and improvement, such as becoming the Writer in Residence at Christ Congregational. An e-mail just came through that the bulletin is ready to be published online, so I better get to it. Better living through technology, allowing me to work hard and pray on the spaces all at once…. because as always, it’s not just the words that matter, but the spaces in between.

White chocolate is not chocolate, but it had to do. I have to go grocery shopping in the worst way, and I had a ton of Lindor truffles left over from Christmas, so I ate a few………. Now my blood sugar is high enough that I can make it out the door, at the very least…. I’ll be able to shop without buying an entire aisle. I need so many things because I can’t bring myself to leave the house most days, which is good. I’ve managed to use up all the staples I’d bought previously and have avoided my temptation to eat out all at once. I wish I could feel embarrassed at my lack of productivity, but I don’t. My work is all Internet, all the time, so even if I’m still in my pajamas, I’m looking for jobs, writing for this web site, working for the church, etc. I may be wearing flannel pants, but it’s all getting done.

Where I feel ashamed is that I’ve let my personal life go by the wayside in terms of taking care of myself… not that all of the above isn’t helping. However, I just don’t want to talk to anyone, don’t want to engage. I just want to be left alone to my own devices most of the time.

The date that I went on to Kingbird in the Watergate was fun. I took the Metro so I could have a second drink if I wanted (a third and it’s hangover city, which is to be avoided at all costs). The first was some sort of whiskey shaken with something that had spices in it, served up. The second was a Stella Artois IN A GLASS. :P~~~~ (Inside joke, they know who they are). The funniest part is that Google Maps walked me right to Kingbird, but it was the back entrance and I had no idea how to get in. I ended up knocking on the glass until a waiter came to the door. The Watergate complex is immense, and if you don’t know where you’re going, there are just SO many ways to get lost.

But anyway, they had some excellent snacks to serve with the drinks, and I am embarrassed to say that since I hadn’t had dinner yet, I ate them like they were going out of style, especially the Sriracha peas. We didn’t make plans to get together again, but it was ok. I showed up, which is a win in my book regardless. I just need to do more of that stuff, you know, where I actually have to iron a shirt and polish my shoes. DC is such a mishmash in terms of getting dressed. DC is sometimes very formal, and sometimes I can’t tell that I’ve actually left Portland. It’s the same uniform here as it is there- pants, shirt, fleece… especially in hippy neighborhoods like Takoma Park. Takoma Park itself is a mishmash, because part of it is in DC and part of it is in Maryland. I think it can best be summed up in a conversation I had at church a couple of years ago.

Leslie: I feel like such a hipster in these brown pants.
Parishioner: Oh, don’t worry. Brown pants just mean you don’t work on The Hill.

Seriously, DC is so Portland sometimes. “Welcome to DC. Here’s your brown hoodie.”

It’s like living in two different worlds, and you can tell immediately which world you’re in based on clothing and Metro stop, as well as the cars parked in the neighborhoods where you’re walking. For instance, Georgetown is all new Mercedes and BMWs. Capitol Hill is old shared Mercedes and BMWs, with five or six staffers to a house.

I used to inhabit that sort of world, wearing skirt suits and panty hose every day to XOM. There were days I felt like a drag queen, but working there was, for the most part, fun…. as long as I put the fact that I was selling my soul to the devil in the back of my mind. There are all these reports about how Rex Tillerson is in bed with the Russian government, and I have a sneaking suspicion that they are Truth.™ Even in 2002, we were working on a project to extract oil from Sakhalin with the ice-breaker boats and everything. You now know the sum total of what I know about the project, but I think that’s enough to say that Rex Tillerson’s relationship with Russia is not new or exciting.

Now I work for companies who have no problem with the Dockers and t-shirt combo, which I never knew I valued until I had to spend almost an hour getting ready in the morning. Let’s not get stupid- I look amazing with my hair and make-up on point. But I’d much rather break it out when I want to instead of have to every day. Plus, because of my dyskinesia, I am awful at walking in heels. I’ll do it, but it’s not my favorite. I fall a lot more often, and as I get older, the falls are more severe…. which is why I didn’t even bring heels when I moved.

Yes, my clothes have a lot to do with not drawing male attention to myself, but they also keep me on my feet most of the time. Rarely have I ever fallen in my Chucks or Docs, even in the snow. I had a bad fall last winter, one that was narcotics worthy and yet, the narcotics still did nothing to touch it save heightening my “I don’t give a shit-o-meter.” I didn’t feel better until I got some Skelaxin on board and a lot of sleep to repair it with lactic acid refresh. The thing that really made the fall horrible was that I had my backpack on. Had I not, I might’ve had an easier time of making the fall more graceful and less painful. However, my backpack hit the ground a few seconds before I did, which made the muscles in my lower back seize. It hurt, but I went ahead and got on the bus, anyway. Several hours later, I couldn’t move. Luckily, Sam was home and came to get me and take me to the doctor.

I bring all this up because in the next couple of weeks we’re supposed to get several snow days in a row where one to three inches is predicted, without enough warmth to let some of the snow melt before it starts again. I can’t wait. I’m going to get some cream and vanilla extract at the store (I already have Sugar in the Raw™ & Splenda™) so that I can make snow ice cream, my mother’s favorite treat when she was a little girl. If she heard that it was snowing, she’d put one of my grandmother’s bowls on top of my grandmother’s car so that the next morning, there was clean, pure snow with which to work. My other favorite is just to gather enough snow to fill a Big Gulp™ and pour diet soda over it. Snow cokes are the best (which is not a trademark because everything in Texas is a coke….. “What kind of coke do you want?” “Grape.” ooooooh, now I’m thinking about a snow Purple Cow……).

Speaking of snow and cold, I’ve finally learned how to use my puffy jacket correctly. Just a t-shirt under it, because it has to soak up my body heat for maximum efficacy (yes, I really do talk like that). There can be layers over it, but if I wear a sweater or a long-sleeve t-shirt/Oxford under it, body heat is blocked from warming up the liner. I may go to Goodwill™ and see if I can find a London Fog™ so my butt doesn’t get cold when I sit down, but it’s not absolutely necessary. When it’s really, really cold I wear skiing silks under my Dockers.™ I like it because when I’m just wearing my skiing silks and a t-shirt, I look like a male ballerina. 🙂

Speaking of which, yesterday this woman at the pharmacy said, “excuse me, sir?” and when I looked up, said, “excuse me, ma’am?” and looked so embarrassed. I said, “I don’t care. Really.” I think she thought I was going to yell at her or something, but when you dress like I do, stuff like that happens all the time. Besides, I feel like I am just as in touch with my male side as I am with my female side, so neither one is a slam or a compliment. It just is. In fact, I imagine that pronoun mistakes happen a lot more than I think in DC because of the enormous amount of female soldiers in the area (Can I have your phone number? :P)

Lindsay helped me get in touch with my inner girly teenager over Christmas, because she gave me all sorts of Punk’d gifts. I am now the proud owner of a Justin Bieber singing electric toothbrush and red nail polish. The nail polish will come in handy because I need to start doing my own nails until I get a job. Then it’s back to acrylics, cut short so they are smooth and available for……………… typing.

It’s starting to really dawn on me just how long it’s been since I’ve been touched in any kind of romantic way, and it’s not a bummer in the slightest. I needed it. I had a lot of shit to own and figure out before I could be ready for anyone new, but now that it’s been almost two years, it’s not that I’m looking, I just notice these things. I notice how out of touch I am with myself in terms of burying myself in memories, which has come with both good and bad side-effects. The good is that I don’t want to hurt anyone the way I hurt Dana, Argo, L-Train, and Notorious. The bad is that I am wondering whether I am doing damage to myself or whether this much time in the desert is exactly what was needed for me to “heal thyself.” The best thing I can do in this situation is to hold the cognitive dissonance in my mind and realize that those things are both true. I am limiting myself by not putting myself out there, AND time to think has been invaluable. I liken it to when Dana and I became friends and all I needed was someone to talk to for hours at a time, without there being any pressure or need to be romantic. When I first appeared on her radar, I’d just had my heart put through a blender, because I was in an age-gap relationship that I wanted to work and she didn’t. Cut to me moving to Houston and meeting a couple with the exact same age difference as my own relationship where they were happy and so in love they couldn’t see straight and I was so jealous I could’ve spit nails. They were so affectionate that every time they kissed, I had to look away in my own pain.

It was the same way when Meag left me. I waited three years before I dated anyone else, and for ten I carried a small flame for her because that’s what first loves do to everyone (I think). It was not a flame of hope, more like “I wish I could meet someone for whom I had a tenth of the emotion.” I thought that person was Kathleen. As it turned out, not so much. Meag and I were sitting alone in an Ottawa SBUX when she said that she was sorry we’d never gotten to be partners as adults, something she thought we would have been very good at. I was glad that she said it in the way of an apology, but my heart and stomach clenched with pain. First loves are nothing to mess around with, and the pain kept getting worse. She said that because she treated me so badly, she thought she didn’t have the right to come back to me and say she was sorry and could we start over. I RAGED inside that she’d taken away my choice…. but perhaps she said it when the feeling behind it wasn’t that strong for her and gutted me.

It was so long ago that I have forgiven, but not forgotten how I felt in that moment. I didn’t find that relationship again until I was 29, about to turn 30. My 30th birthday party was a coming out of sorts, where all my friends got to find out that the thing they’d been thinking all these years was true…. Dana and I were in love with each other. We were still in the “get a room” phase and everyone at the table knew it. The looks on their faces were priceless. Yes, I was in love with Kathleen, but nowhere in our relationship did we have the depth of emotion that Dana and I did, because we spent so long taking care of each other as friends that there was no way either of us didn’t know what contract we were signing.

I suppose that’s what I’m waiting for now. Someone where it feels from the beginning that I’ve known them my whole life. It’s a tall order, but I am extraordinarily patient.

More patient than waiting for snow.

I went to pick up my nerve pills, cause everybody be wonderin.’ So I get there and the pharmacy tech hands me my prescriptions and I take them out to the car where my water bottle lives. I pick up the bottle marked clonazepam (Klonopin™) and take out two pills. I realize that they don’t look like clonazepam and there cannot possibly be 60 pills in the bottle. It was then that I realized it was escitalopram (Lexapro™) in a bottle marked clonazepam and vice versa. The only reason I didn’t notice immediately is that sometimes generic pills change shape if the pharmacy switches to a different manufacturer… but before I took two escitaloprams, I decided to check the “clonazepam” bottle first. Lo and behold, I was right. They’d given me mismatched bottles.

I wasn’t exactly hacked off about it, but I was concerned that it happened, and decided to go back into the pharmacy. You cannot imagine what an egregious mistake this is for non-medical people who wouldn’t necessarily grab on to the fact that the pills looked different and so was the dosage. If I’d taken two escitaloprams, it wouldn’t have killed me. But there are plenty of other drugs where it would’ve, and I didn’t want to get mad at anybody, but it was a responsibility/liability issue. I am the type person that would have taken them home and switched them out without saying anything in order not to have to interact again…. just not today. I was feeling angry about something else, and though I never let it show, it did give me enough courage to walk back in and talk to them about it.

Of course they were horrified, and should have been. Had I not known exactly what to look for, I cannot imagine what would have happened to my mood and behavior. It didn’t happen to me, but it very easily could have happened to someone else. Doubling your SSRI and halfing your benzo is two different things. Less clonazepam wouldn’t have hurt me, I just might have felt a little more anxiety than usual. More escitalopram would have made me euphoric at first and then disconnected from my emotions altogether after a week or so because my seratonin level would have gone through the roof.

Let me make it clear that this is an actionable offense, but I am not that person. My main concern was calling their attention to it, because what if it had been heart medication and narcotics? Depending on the dosage, the narcotics could have made autonomic breathing shut off, especially if the heart medication was halfed and the narcotics were doubled (again, depending on dosage). It’s not worth a court case, but it is worth writing about it to warn others to check and make sure that the medication is correct, as well as making sure everyone in the pharmacy loses blood in their faces, because they knew what the consequences would have been had I not been nice about it.

Here’s the easiest solution. Register for Epocrates, click on Drugs at the main menu, find your drug, and go to the “Pill pictures” link. That way, there can be no mistake. Or, if the pill looks different, just take it back to the pharmacy and ask if they’ve switched manufacturers or if the bottle isn’t labeled correctly. If the bottle is not labeled correctly, you will get the desired reaction without having to even raise your voice.

In short, be careful. No pharmacist is perfect.

Now that she has been struck down, she will become more powerful than we can possibly imagine. –Kristie Berthelotte

I feel like Carrie Fisher would laugh if I paraphrased her, so Carrie’s death hurt all three of my feelings.

Of course, realistically, it was a gut punch of enormous proportions. I don’t think that people who suffer from mental health issues will realize what an advocate they’ve lost until reality sets in, because right now we are all engulfed in shock. There’s been a disturbance in the force and we are reeling from it. The best we can do is take some of her incredible energy and put it into our own hearts, because that is the part of her which will live on. Because she was an actor, she is immortal.

My best guess is that every ticket for Rogue One today in the nation just sold out, and for those who aren’t going to the movies, the Star Wars series is queued up in binge-watch order. It makes so much sense. Watching her on screen is what keeps her alive, an idea that resonates with me because why do you think I write about Dana and Argo so much? If I do, they’re still with me. They’re still present. They’re still  three dimensional instead of flat and lifeless. They didn’t die, but our relationships did, which is sometimes harder than death because their lives are still going on, their beauty and humor still out there in the world, going on without me. There are solid reasons for it, but beyond logic I am still entitled to feelings about them…. wonderful and terrible… painful, honest, and real. In that way, they have gained immortality (at least, to me) as well.

Celebrity deaths are reminders of the deaths and immortalities that occur all around us, because we can’t say we knew them personally… and yet, sometimes they hurt that much. Star Wars and I are the same age, so Princess Leia has been a fixture in my life since I was born. Thanks to movie theaters and the Internet, she always will be.

I think it’s a classical music sort of day, listening to all the Requiems I love. Through music, I can let the people that their composers wished to be immortal live as well.

Goodnight, sweet Princess… letting everything I’ve lost so personally lie down in green pastures as well.

I got to the church 45 minutes early because I wasn’t sure of the call time this morning and thought it was better to be early and hang out in my office if I was wrong than oversleep. I only got about five hours of sleep last night… more than most parents still putting toys together, but less than I really wanted. I couldn’t fall asleep. I opened all of my presents save the one marked “Do Not Open Until Christmas Day” because my plan is to leave church, get some lunch, and go see Rogue One. I saw The Force Awakens last Christmas Day, so apparently now it’s a thing. In order to be a good Jew, lunch will be Chinese food.

I wasn’t technically raised Jewish, but twice in my life I’ve had Jewish next door neighbors and we’ve celebrated both holidays. The first time was when I was in kindergarten/first grade, and my parents were going to let me go to Hebrew school with the neighbor kids (if it’s allowed- I don’t know) when we got the announcement that we were moving to Naples from Galveston. I cannot imagine how far ahead I would be in life had I learned Hebrew as a child, because learning a language is so much tougher for adults than it is for kids, and both Hebrew and Greek are MDiv requirements.

The second time I had Jewish neighbors, “Mark” showed up on our front doorstep in Ninja Turtle boxers (only funny because he was in his 40s at the time… maybe still is, I’m not good with age) on a Jewish high holy day (I think it was Yom Kippur, but don’t quote me on it) and said, you want some Jew food? Yes. Yes, we did.

As t-shirt wisdom dictates, I am not a Jew, but I am Jew-ish. As Christians, we all are, really… It pains me to think of just how many people there are in this country that don’t know it. But the important thing is that I do.

In other news, today is “Ugly Sweater” day at church, and I do not have an entry in the competition. By the time I found out it was “Ugly Sweater Day” (last night) it was too late to find one. I had to make due with a plain green sweater instead, but underneath I am wearing my t-shirt that has Darth Vader walking AT-ATs on a leash like puppies. If only I’d found THAT in an ugly sweater variety. As Matt said when he walked in this morning, not that it’s a competition, but I’m going to win. If he broadcasts today, I’ll post a picture of him, because his sweater is truly…. memorable. However, if I’d managed to find a Star Wars ugly sweater, I think I could have beaten him…. Win, I would have….

I know this sounds ridiculous for an almost 40-year-old adult, but my favorite ugly sweaters and t-shirts must have dinosaurs. I went through a phase in elementary school where dinosaurs were all I talked about, so it must be a “throwback” to that time in my life. I have ordered all the dinosaur t-shirts on 6DollarShirts.com, but they were lost in the move. My favorite, which got the most comments from others, had a T-Rex lying horizontally across it and said T-Rex hates push-ups (Big head, little arms)…. another ugly sweater contender had it come in such a variety.

Now that we’ve gone from Star Wars to Jews to dinosaurs, it’s time to grab my music and get to the sanctuary. I can’t believe I just left here 12 hours ago… however, it feels like a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away….

Have a Merry Christmas you will, ya’ll.

 

Despite my best efforts to stop it, Christmas has come, anyway. I just keep thinking what kind of world is this that my mother is not here? What kind of world is this that in some sense, I will never go home again? What kind of world is this where there will be no pictures of my possible wedding, possible kids or step-kids, no possible anything with my mother in them? The only thing I have that even comes close is a few pictures of my high school graduation, and that’s it. No graduation from college, no graduation from divinity school, no ordination, no pictures of me standing in front of my first call or church plant. No pictures of her at the piano playing during my first service. I am certainly not, but there are times when I feel utterly alone, as if no one understands and yet, plenty of people do.

What kind of world IS THIS?

It is new and frightening, not because of world events, but because of my own… although it seems as if my mother’s death should be writ that large. Everyone should know what a light the world has lost, and everyone should share in my pain. Of course, this is impossible… but when you lose a parent, it seems as if earth has stopped rotating on its axis and spinning around the sun. Nothing should ever be the same, because I won’t. It’s selfish and egocentric to think that the world should stop for everyone else, and it doesn’t.

Other people go on about their busy lives as I try to put my own back together into some semblance of the new normal. The only problem is that it can’t be normalized, and never will be. I feel guilty for all the moments I missed, and yet I know that I can’t be held responsible for what I didn’t know. And Jesus, there are so many things I didn’t know.

Why in the crippling fuck did I choose to move? Because at the time, it seemed like the most sensible solution to ending my relationship with Dana, because I never could have done it without a physical boundary. Our relationship was so sacred, so full of energy that I never would have stopped trying, never would have allowed myself or Dana the space to really think about whether getting back together was a good idea, never would have stopped thinking that she was the only person in the entire world for me, because at the time, she was my world. I couldn’t move without thinking of her on the exhale. She was my electricity and my grounding wire all at the same time. In addition to being absolutely crazy about her, she was also my “Danabase,” the person that created location memories because I’m terrible at it, so when I was tearing about the house looking for my keys, wallet, phone, etc. most of the time all I had to do was ask her for it. She was invaluable to me in both romantic and companionate love, the easiest relationship I’d ever had most of the time. Therefore, since we didn’t have children and therefore nothing tying me to Houston, I just left. I know myself too well. I would have fought to the death to get her back and gone through an even bigger world of pain when it didn’t work, and on some level, I knew it wouldn’t. It was better for me to slink off with my tail between my legs than it was to put energy where it wasn’t wanted. I could rebuild. I always do. However, to paraphrase Eleven, I’ll never forget the time that Leslie was me.

What I Know for Sure™ is that if I could go back and do it again, knowing that my world was about to end, I would have stayed put. I would have gone to my mother’s every choir performance, I would have visited more, I would have shown up. I would have completely forgotten my own needs and just spent more time getting to soak up her everyday life, and she would have wanted that. We were always trying to make up for lost time, and it has run out in the most disastrous way possible.

I am not ready for Christmas, and possibly never will be again, but my mother just died in October. It is a cruel joke that the holidays and my mother’s death are so close together. It is so hard to find new life, new hope the child will bring… and listen… to the angels sing.

I just thought the holidays were hard after torching my relationships with Diane, Dana, Argo, and countless others as I turned inward because I’d done so much wrong in so short a time. What I have to remember is that I torched my relationship with Diane because it needed to happen, butt quick. I torched my relationships with others because my reactions to it were cut down to wet cat backed into a corner, claws extended…. except with my mother.

I could cry with her, and her mirror neurons made her cry with me, simply because I was hurt. I could be vulnerable with her in a way that I couldn’t be with anyone else. I got to have conversations with her that I never thought I would have, because I thought that she was too homophobic to have them. Once those issues were resolved, the conversation I remember the most clearly is when Dana and I were trying to get pregnant (we only made it as far as seeing the OB/GYN and exploring picking out a donor) and she listened, telling me her long and difficult story of trying to get pregnant with me. It took five years, and she told me that the reason why is that something was wrong with her uterus. She thinks that she may have gotten pregnant once before, and the implantation stuck before the cells died. She went to the doctor and had the procedure to remove that damaged tissue, and got pregnant relatively easily after that… but she lamented the years she didn’t know what was wrong, and told me that she and my dad were just starting to explore adoption when she found out she was pregnant. She laughed when I told her that Dana was not interested in getting pregnant, but if her family was any indication, she knew she was “fertile Myrtle” if I wasn’t.

It now makes so much more sense about why I was such an attack dog in trying to protect Dana from her own parents, who made it clear that they wouldn’t come to our wedding (finally, finally they changed their minds on that one) and my children would not be their grandchildren. It was the only reason I wanted Dana to get pregnant instead of me… so that their grandparents would see them as valid, because my parents would have, anyway. My mom listened as I told her that if the kid was indeed mine, Dana needed to go and stay at her parents’ house with the baby alone, so that they saw her as the mother of that child and not just a glorified babysitter. We also decided that breast feeding would be limited, so that either one of us could feed our child and have those bonding moments, and my mom just listened.

You cannot imagine how hard it was to say the words to my mother that I wanted to have a baby, because I thought they would awkwardly hang in the air. Relief flooded my body when they didn’t. She just loved me so unconditionally even when she was uncomfortable. Because she was uncomfortable, I wish I’d tried harder to bridge the gap. My main coping mechanism was to have hours-long phone calls in which we only talked about her… and perhaps it was for the best, because I wasn’t running away from her entirely, just self-selecting what she knew about my life and what she didn’t.

For instance, I wore long-sleeve shirts around her for three years so she would find out I’d gotten a tattoo on my forearm so long after the fact that it wouldn’t matter anymore. She didn’t meet anyone I was dating until we we’d been together so long that the relationship was solid. The only people she didn’t meet that I wanted her to were Dana’s parents, because they had dinner with my Dad and Angela, but would have shared so much more common ground with my mom, because she struggled so much harder to accept me than my dad did… and mostly because she was worried about me, as if I had some sort of design flaw that she’d created herself. By the time she would have met Dana’s parents, she’d let go of that idea and if the conversation had steered in that direction, perhaps my mother would have been their own personal PFLAG…. and now I’ll never know, for so many reasons.

I remember that at HATCH (Houston Area Teen Coalition of Homosexuals), I won an award for all the public speaking I’d done at local churches, and she went to the awards ceremony with me. She was dating a Republican judge at the time, and she choked on her water when she found out the keynote speaker was Sheila Jackson Lee. She wasn’t threatened by a room full of gay people, but a Democrat was just beyond the pale.

As she got older, she got more and more liberal, but at that time in her life she was all “R” all the time. She used to wear this t-shirt I loved that said, “take the law into your own hands… hug a judge.” I also remember that phone call, the one where she was wailing and said, they found the judge dead in the bed… and the phone was off the hook because he’d been talking to me. She berated herself for a long time because she thought she could have done something, but his heart just wore out… probably from being too big. My mother used to teach in a school that was predominantly black and poor, and the judge poured out his pockets for it. When they needed school supplies or coats, he was all over it. At his funeral, we were considered family, and I remember riding in the limo to the cemetery absolutely not knowing what to say, because there was nothing to say.

Just like there is nothing anyone can say to me now that would carry more weight than the tapes that run in my own mind. One line that is keeping me sane is something Dr. Susan Leo said in a Christmas Eve service long ago… that Christmas Eve is the one night of the year where the membrane between heaven and earth stretches so thin we can reach up and touch it. I can imagine it. I can touch my mother’s face.

I have never believed in the traditional versions of heaven and hell, choosing to focus on the heaven and hell that’s already here… most notably, the heaven and hell I create for myself. But tonight, of all nights, I choose to believe that Susan is right, and that my mother will be reaching down to touch my face as well.

Amen.
#prayingonthespaces

Yesterday I spent some time shopping (didn’t buy anything) and got my hair did. When I came home, I was exhausted and spent about an hour submitting my resumé for anything and everything I could think of because that didn’t take much energy and then thought, “I’ll take a nap.” I should have set an alarm, because I didn’t wake up until 0400. I didn’t even notice that my phone was ringing, I was so out of it, so I have phone calls to return today. I can only think that it was my body’s way of saying “you thought you were well? Not so fast, Leslie.” However, I feel 100 percent better this morning after having spent an hour or so with Sam drinking coffee and talking about our lives. I may or may not have drunk most of the pot myself.

On the plus side, now I know exactly how much coffee it takes to rip my stomach in half.

I’ve spent more time off the grid because I was starting to feel like I didn’t have anything to write about. There’s only so many times I want to hear that my mother is dead, much less sounding like a broken record to you. But who am I kidding? I am a broken record most of the time….. hello, Dana…. hello, Argo…. hello, incessant tapes running through my head until they’re done….

I’m going out with someone new tonight. She works in the science/medical field, which is completely different from me and yet we have enough to connect on to make conversation. I don’t know if there will be a romantic spark, but I do know that I want to spend time with her regardless. I like having smart people around me, and she’s definitely that. We’re meeting at the Watergate, and I told her I’d never been there before and I might have to geek out and take pictures. In terms of the United States, I live where the history comes from,  to paraphrase Eddie Izzard.

Because we both have Gmail, I sent her a calendar invite, and she commented on it… and I’m like, “oh my God… she might think I’m a real adult or something.” I live and die by Google Calendar because if I didn’t, I’d never make it anywhere. The Google Suite is basically my ADD medication.

So far, I’ve been on a couple of “first dates” that ended up being great friendships because you can’t force a romantic spark, especially when you’re not looking for one. “Dates” in quotation marks because I could force myself to leave the house and have a good time, but seriously still stuck on processing my old life to make room for a new one. I still don’t know that I’m ready, but what I do know is that unless I start dating the girl that delivers my pizza, it’s not going to happen in the comfort of my house.

Although as I have said before, if I do start dating the girl that delivers my pizza, I already know three things:

1. She is employed.
2. She has a vehicle.
3. She already knows the way to my house.

The joke there is that I’ve only had one woman deliver a pizza to me in the entire time I’ve been ordering.

I do want to get out and do new things so that I have more to write about than the past, but depression and anxiety have stopped me from doing many of the things I’ve wanted because I just didn’t have the energy (see above). I want to be able to tell new stories instead of continuing to focus on old ones, but at the same time, it helps for my blog to lag behind my real life so that I have some perspective on what’s happening rather than it being stream-of-consciousness. Sometimes it is, but most of the time what you’re getting is reflection, and hopefully the peace that comes with it. I feel like I have reconciled all I can reconcile and everything else is left up to me.

I didn’t want to give up Argo or Dana, but I did. It “takes two to tango” is a thing, but I very fully own that a lot of it was my fault entirely. There are so many things I could have done differently over the last three years, and reflection on what I’ve done (and left undone) has made it clear to me what I don’t want in the future. I pray a lot, trying to find that still, small voice inside me that directs me where to go next. I listen to a lot of podcasts that are centered on self-improvement, my favorites being The Robcast and On Being with Krista Tippett. I also listen to Tim Ferris, but what’s different with The Robcast is that when he endorses books, I buy them. So far I’ve gotten Dynamics of Faith by Paul Tillich and Honest to God by John A. T. Robinson. Both are fantastic. Rob hasn’t let me down yet. 🙂

Of course, I’m also reading for fun…. a book I got for free on BookBub called Revenge and a Bottle of Merlot. It’s about a woman who is being emotionally abused and cheated on by her husband, so she and her best friends hatch a plan to get him back for it. Considering how badly the woman is treated by her husband, the book is light, funny and a quick read.

It feels nice to laugh again. I can’t laugh all the time, but when I do, I try to make those moments last. I am trying to emerge from the dark unscathed, but having my mother die so suddenly and its aftermath is a darkness for which I was completely unprepared. I know that no one is ever ready for the death of a parent, but there was no time where she was sick, no time to get used to the idea, no time to do anything but sit in mind-altering confusion.

Though the fog is still all around me, I have at least acquired lamps.

I hope that tonight will be memorable. I hope I have a new friend. Anything more than that is just icing, and if I look at it that way, then I am not afraid of letting new people in. When I take it to the extreme of planning what it would look like to drag someone into my freak show of a life, I get overwhelmed and give up, happy to stay home with a book and some tea. I tend to get too far ahead of myself, because that’s what visionaries do. It is not altogether helpful unless I’m talking about my career, because that is limited to me.

Right now I need to vision myself doing some laundry and polishing my shoes.

Because I’m meeting someone new.

I don’t want to write today, and haven’t for a while. I keep thinking that if I put Christmas off, it just won’t happen this year. On the other hand, I don’t want my Advent series to be missing anything, so I’m sure I’ll finish that, too, once I stop feeling the need to push away the baby. It’s people like me that need the baby the most, and right now I can’t stop myself. Christmas has never happened for me without my mother… not once… so why not just stop all the clocks (a poem that speaks to me deeply because even though it is about romantic love, one line is silence the pianos. Some days, I laugh through my memories. Today is not one of them.

I am sure this is a passing feeling, but it’s where I am.

My friends have been over-the-top in their love and care of me, and it is working. But at the same time, there’s only so much other people can say which ease my mind for more than a moment at a time. People have often told me what grief is like when they’ve lost a parent, but grief is as individual as a fingerprint. There is no overarching message, no one-stop shopping to fix it based on learning about the experiences of others.

No one told me that I’d be extremely jealous of people who still have their mothers, especially when they are so much older than me. No one told me that there would be moments I’d actually forget my mother was dead, and everything would all come crashing back as if it was happening all over again. No one told me that I’d feel in some ways as if my future was ruined, not overall, but that immense, intense part where my mother is on the front row of everything I do, cheering me on.

No one told me what it was like to feel like half an orphan, that in a lot of ways, even though Lindsay and I are into our 30s and I will be 40 in September, it feels like my dad is taking on the role of single parent even now. For the record, he’s doing a bang-up job. It’s just that now I have one less person to call, one less person that will talk to me until we both run out of things to say… or, more accurately, my mother transitioning from talking to asking for tech support.

One time she even flew me in from Portland to fix her computer because it was cheaper than taking it to Best Buy. Unfortunately, this is completely true.

Speaking of Best Buy and Christmas, I know I’ve told this story before, but it should be put here as well. You can download Red Hat disc images and burn them yourself to install, but if you bought it at an electronics store, it came with a year’s worth of tech support. I put it on my Christmas list that year… it must have been my sophomore year of college. The following conversation ensues:

Mom: I need a copy of Red Hat for my daughter for Christmas and I have no idea what that is.

Best Buy Guy: Wow! Linux is a big operating system for a little girl!

Mom: She’s 20.

The look on Best Buy Guy’s face was priceless, because he didn’t say anything after that.

And honestly, I can’t say anything more, either.

I just took a big heaping dose of Chloraseptic, just sprayed it down my throat until I couldn’t feel anything, because I have two hours and 15 minutes until I need to show up for choir. I had a conductor once who said never to sing after you’ve used it, because it’s like singing while wearing white gloves. It’s a mask that covers up pain so that you cannot tell what damage you’re doing because you don’t know to stop when it hurts. When I’m on vocal rest, as I am now, it’s invaluable because not only does it make my throat hurt less, it stops whatever irritation is making me cough, and I will take anything I can get in that arena. I have decided that I have been sick long enough that I’m going to go to the doctor tomorrow. My GP is fantastic in that you don’t need an appointment. If you get there before 1500, you can just wait in line.

Now that I’ve been sick for a week, I think I need a course of antibiotics, because now I’m convinced that the stuff coming out of me is infected and this is not just a passing cold. If he’ll do it (read: has the equipment), I also want a shot of Depo-Medrol to bring down all the inflammation in my vocal chords. I know how some of you feel about steroids. Shut it. This is the solution that works for me and has for many years because I don’t do it unless there is a major need for it. I am coughing so hard I’ve thrown my back out and I have a HUGE singing engagement next Sunday. HUGE. It’s not just that I’m in a quartet and therefore featured. It’s that next Sunday is basically a choral festival with no sermon and there are two services, one at 9:00 and one at 11:00. We’re talking two solid hours of singing with very little break in between. It would be “Lessons & Carols” if we were Episcopalian, but instead of basic carols, it’s monster anthems in which my head voice (high range) is in use most of the time. Nothin’ says lovin’ like being this sick and having to pull a high A out of nowhere… meaning that there is no scale up, I just have to find it and hold it for six beats. Finding it is not the problem. When I’m sick, it’s harder to have the kind of breath control to keep it in tune that long, and/or hold it for one beat, much less six. I was kidding the choir that since it’s a capella, could they please just keep getting flatter as a group so that no one notices that by the time we get there, it’s actually an F sharp?

Today’s anthem is The Yearning, by Craig Courtney. If you hear it and you know my mother, you’ll know it is exactly the sort of thing my mother would have picked for her own choir. It has a gorgeous piano accompaniment, which my mother preferred because even though she COULD play the organ, it wasn’t her instrument. They seem the same, but they are most definitely not. The first time I heard it, I heard my mother in it, and I was weeping by the end. After the last chord rang, I turned to Ingrid and said, “did it just get all Christmas in here?”

It did.