Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Louis Pasteur, Michelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.

H. Jackson Brown

I’ve been thinking a lot about time now that I’m almost 39 (on Sept. 10th). When this quote came up on my wallpaper changer, I thought it expressed something I desperately needed to hear. Lots of these people did not hit their full potential until later in life. I have been told since kindergarten that I haven’t been “working up to my full potential,” mostly because my ADD was not diagnosed, and I had a hard time focusing on the tasks right in front of me. Then, in middle school, trauma added to regular ADD to make thinking about my home life 20 times more than I could ever focus on homework, unless I was trying to impress a girl. I got way better grades on their homework than I did on my own… a cautionary tale that would follow me my whole life. I could handle other people’s problems better than I could focus on my own… getting their lives together in a matter of minutes while my own languished behind.

I think that’s why I have been so selfishly inward at this time in my life, because I am tired of trying to make everyone else happy without realizing that I am wasting my own emotional toolbox, because I am directing it it outward without applying everything I’ve learned to, well, me.

If I am going to realize the dreams I have for myself, this must be the case. I cannot bring “my stuff” into the “swimsuit competition” of ordination. I have to resolve it so that I am not directing other people’s problems with what I would do, but able to listen without waiting to talk, waiting to pass judgment, waiting to deal with their problems swiftly and easily, when that is generally not what people want or need. They just want to be heard. This realization hit me over the head, and I realized that I did not have to internalize other people’s problems, I only had to step away and look with clinical separation… in short… Boundaries. Get some.

Pastors are generally called in during the worst times in people’s lives, because that is when they need pastoral care the most. I will never make a good one if I become those problems, taking them on and walking around in them as if they are my own. I know from my past that it interrupts my thought process and my dreams… because while I have never been a pastor, I have been that friend/girlfriend… giving them everything they didn’t need instead of everything they did. In some sense, you’re allowed to walk around in your friends’ problems, because they agree to walk in yours. But is it particularly helpful? You cannot pour from an empty cup, and dealing with others’ problems, no matter how close they are to you, is an easy way to start giving from nothing. Healthy reactions are built on the knowledge that self-preservation is what allows you to keep giving, day by day. Unhealthy reactions are built on allowing yourself to be “emotionally vampired,” and most of the time it happens organically, because you care about them so much that you allow it. Your emotional life is built on what you will allow. Life starts to make sense when you realize you cannot allow other people to drain you and still keep giving at the same time, because again, you cannot pour from an empty cup.

It is not even sane or reasonable to allow yourself to “emotionally vampire” other people because they’re doing the same to you. It just invites co-dependence, so that you are no longer responsible for your own well-being. Relationships are an interdependence, whereas both people have to remain strong for themselves, allowing verbal processing, but not making it where I worry more about your pain because you’re worrying about mine. That experience is hard won, and you can take it to the bank and cash it.

…because if you cannot stand on your own two feet, it bleeds into other areas of your life, particularly if you are in a profession that invites other people to open up to you because they see you as a “safe space.” You cannot have that co-dependence with everyone who walks into your office. Not only is it not healthy, but a power imbalance that is not easily broken, and completely and totally inappropriate.

I process in order to find out who I am, so that by the time I am ordained, I am secure in myself so that “crazy spatter” is limited to my own head and not imposed on others. It’s been a good decision, because the only thing over which I have absolute control are my own actions/reactions and responses. The difference between the two is time. A reaction is knee-jerk. A response is thoughtful, and requires craft.

I think all the time about what might have happened with Kathleen and Dana had I been willing to respond rather than react. It’s the same with close friends, but even more so with intimate relationships because with both women, I wanted to spend my life with them. Who enters into a marriage thinking it’s going to end? If you do, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. In a lot of ways, I should have thought about that before I married Dana, because she was convinced from our first date on that I would leave her… and nothin’ says lovin’ like we’re just going to break up, anyway. I’ve used that line before, and it is still just as true now as the first time I thought it. My relationship with Dana was everything I thought it would be and more, both of us willing to forgive an enormous amount of shit in the name of supporting each other through our trials and tribulations. I don’t know why Argo was different, but she was. Perhaps by that time, we both realized what a shitshow our relationship had become, because we were both hiding behind enormous masks of funny… resentment and anger boiling under the surface, but never bubbling up to the top so we could deal with it together. But it wasn’t always like that. We were a team right up until we weren’t.

Argo hit the nail on the head when she said, “you guys have taken care of each other over the years… this implosion is not good.” No. No, it wasn’t. I have realized over time that falling in love with Argo’s mind was not an action, but a reaction to all the loneliness and sadness I felt over the implosion, because it was an injection of dopamine at a time when I desperately needed to feel good about myself. Argo is so incredibly brilliant logically that it took me away from Dana’s depression and her unwillingness to pull herself out of it. I realized that I could not be responsible for her happiness, only she could do that. I begged her parents to help me, and it worked for a time, but the limitation of them being in DC and us being in Houston could only do so much. If Argo had anything to do with our breakup, it wasn’t the way I felt about her so much as the fact that she helped me see all the pieces on the chessboard instead of always trying to play White.

I should have played Black more. I should have listened more and talked less. I should have kept forgiving over and over, rather than being offended, angry, and resentful… because sometimes it is better to take one for the team instead of being right and alone. It might have kept the emotional swings at bay…. or maybe not. Perhaps our relationship had run its course, and it took stepping away to see it, because there is only so much you can do to pull others out of their depression when you don’t know what to do about your own. That problem might have resolved itself if we’d both learned to deal with anger appropriately.

But we didn’t.

I have talked over and over about the bait-and-switch Dana began to levy at me once Argo came into our lives, because all of the sudden, we couldn’t fight and forgive regarding our own problems without Dana making it all about how she thought I was on my way out the door. Nothing could have been farther from the truth, but it was her reality, and I should have paid more attention to it rather than being lost in my own thoughts.

There are plenty of reasons I was mired in that relationship, but I should have been able to step away with some clinical separation rather than taking on Argo’s problems as my own. However, it is less regret and more realizing with the passage of time all I could have done that I didn’t and forgiving myself for it so that it doesn’t happen again.

Because there are things now that I will not allow.

Sometimes I wish I had a magic ball so that I could predict what needs to happen in order for me to let go of the past and move into a better place. I feel I have already come so far, because it has taken an extraordinary amount of digging into the past so that I am not doomed to repeat it… and it is the only reason I do.

There’s no rhyme or reason as to how memories and grief interact in my brain, only that they do. Grief is not a one-time process where you slowly move in a straight line toward wholeness. It’s more like a graph, where there are points on the x, y, and z axes that are alternately hilarious and heart-wrenching. Some days are always better than others, and yesterday was not one of those days in which I could laugh off anything. I tried. God, how I tried… but grief rained down on my head like a thunderstorm, and as much as I tried to laugh, they were fleeting moments in a total shitshow of a day.

I couldn’t reach out. I could only reach in, lost in the nebula of my own mind as I tried to refocus grief into high-energy music, endorphins, anything to change my frame of reference. And then I tried to close my eyes, and that is when grief is the most annoying, because if it doesn’t keep me awake with rumination, it haunts my dreams.

It hasn’t been that long since a catastrophe of a divorce and an even shorter time since I stopped asking Argo what she thought and started reaching into my own heart to receive peace about the situation. In a huge way, it felt like taking a piece of my soul and just slicing it to bits in both directions… something from which I will never recover, but will at least fade into the background as I get further and further away with time. I have learned to trust the z-axis as much as I trust air.

I didn’t learn about the z-axis until I started working with web sites that have layers. Closer images have higher z-axis values. So, in my career, I have learned more about life and how it works. Over time, the z-axis value becomes lower and lower, and it is something to which I look forward.

My blog has to lag behind my current life, because I need to get perspective on something before I am ready to put it to “paper.” You’ll hear about now several months down the line as I process what is happening day-to-day in my head… which is why my blog is so focused on recovery from the last two or three years rather than stream-of-consciousness as I walk through my day. Of course there is some of that- how could there not? But at the same time, reflection and reminiscence is how I deal… and I’m not interested in your opinions on it. I can only help myself through my writing, and hope that those who join along can identify with what I am saying. As I have always said, “it’s my process, and you’re invited.” However, you are not required. If something about my blog bothers you, feel free not to read it. Change the channel. I’m sure Heather Armstrong and Jenny Lawson are better at this than I am. Feel free to read them instead.

Additionally, there are so few people in my life that know who my friends are.. the rest are anonymous, with just a double-paned window into my life and never a door.

Right now, I am dealing with the very real sense that nothing good can come out of Nazareth… rejected by my own people and celebrated by strangers… and trying to come to terms with it because just like Jesus, I cannot reach the people in my home town.

I love comments from my friends that don’t take away my power. I hate the ones that refuse to see that I am owning my life, mistakes, vulnerabilities, and all that comes with it… and that it will take time. Actively trying to pull me away from it only increases my anxiety, as if I am not doing enough, not being enough, that I am not enough as I am. It is a journey that I am taking into wholeness, one that is not achieved with a few steps here and there. Releasing my past takes an understanding of it. I have made mistakes; they are ones in which it will take me a long time to forgive myself. As the z-axis continues to push things further away from me, it is only because I have blessed and released my enormity of feelings about what I have done and left undone.

I cannot walk past these things, only through them.

In my current iteration, I am trying hard to create new relationships that do not have a tint of the past, meaning that I am actively using the lessons I’ve learned rather than being the man who regrets and the man who forgets. What that means is often responding to questions with what has happened rather than what is happening, and I cannot help it. Not understanding that is not understanding me and how my mind works, and I am not interested in creating relationships where I am forced to be something that I am not and will never be. My personality type dictates that I lead others forward into self-reflection by revealing my own… something that all INFJs are wont to do.

For instance, would you (if you watched) have been so invested in The Oprah Winfrey Show if she hadn’t started with telling people from whence she came, and how she handled her own obstacles before she started reaching out to others? I think not. Additionally, I do not think she would have received the platform she was given if she hadn’t.

I received a platform when I started talking about my abuse, a project that I started in solitude and people started joining along. I did not ask for the platform, it was given to me, and that has made all the difference in how I see myself. In a way, I have led by serving. Even in the military, the most regimented organization in the world, the best generals lead from the back, unwilling to have anyone do anything they would not do on their own.

The best compliment I’ve ever gotten came after I received my platform, one line that will live in my memory for ages… “you simply must keep talking… for the rest of us.” Of course, that was when I talked every day about how childhood abuse affected my adult reactions and responses, and when I was finished with it, the story had to move forward somehow… and yet, the story hasn’t changed too much, because childhood emotional abuse and PTSD are still a continuing problem, because it still affects my reactions and responses. The way I was rewired, in some sense, will never leave me. I cannot erase my past, but I can learn to manage it. My faults are where my reactions lay out their inescapable defense mechanisms, and not only can you see it, so can I.

I refuse to become a person that keeps their emotions locked in a box where I am forced not to think about them, because the longer they stay in there, the longer I allow them to torture me. Exorcising my demons is what frees me, because there are no hidden recesses in which I cannot shine light.

Amen.
#prayingonthespaces

The CEO invited all of us to an Orioles game, and I said, “might I suggest a game against the Houston Astros?” He said, “of course… I thought you’d never ask. :P” The last time I went to Camden Yards, it was with a group from XOM in which we proceeded to drink beer at Hooters and then walk to the park, where I promptly fell asleep on Kathleen’s shoulder for three innings. Hey, it was a hot day and we’d all had 23 oz mugs. The best part of the game was that it was against the Pittsburgh Pirates, and Moises Alou was playing for them. So as much as I like the Os, I was one of the few people in the park screaming, “Ah-LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” Then, driving home, we got lost.. and you never want to get lost in Baltimore. We wound up in a neighborhood where I just knew we were going to be murdered if we stopped at a stop sign. There’s a reason it’s called Bodymore, Murderland. Good times.

Yes, I have seen The Wire. Yes, it IS just like that.

However, I did briefly consider moving to Baltimore, saying that I was “much more John Waters than John Boehner.” It’s a great ciy, if you know where to go. If you don’t, God help you.

I’m trying to inject some humor into my writing today, because depression is raging within me and I can’t seem to snap myself out of it. Nothing is wrong, per se. I just feel like crap, and some days, it just happens for no reason. Or perhaps there is a reason in body memory, but I don’t know what it might be. I could probably look through my e-mail and try to piece it together, but I won’t, because it might exacerbate the problem rather than relieving it. Today is one of those days that I could tie a Reiki healer in knots. After I get off work, I must take a walk. Mobility helps. I do my best thinking while walking and the endorphins start to kick in. For now, I will have to do with swinging my legs at my desk and shaking the negative energy off my hands just to fight the deep grey. We’re probably at about 30%. With a walk, I can probably get it down to 10.

I hate being such a “Debbie Downer” sometimes, but depression happens. Even with an SSRI, a mood stabilizer, and benzos for anxiety, I still can’t get rid of it completely. All I can do is manage. I did put on some Ke$ha, though, so perhaps I can get my heart beating like an 808 drum and that will help. I was so proud of myself when I figured out that 808 was the area code for Hawaii.

There. That IS a little better.

“Your Love is My Drug” was the last dance at Lindsay’s wedding, and Dana and I were dancing like there was no tomorrow. Then, the song took on a dark and sinister meaning when Argo and I began writing to each other… because my judgment was gettin’ kinda hazy. Every fucking word of that song except for “slumber party in my basement” became a cautionary tale… dopamine is addictive, and the struggle was real… even for her, in some sense, because while she has never and will never be bi-identified, there was still the rush of talking every fifteen minutes, flipping each other shit and just generally making each other feel good, which is what dopamine does, anyway.

However, today the dark and sinister means nothing to me, because I am choosing to focus on that last dance with Dana. It’s such a great memory, because the place went wild and we were all dancing like no one was watching, which is good, because I am not a dancer. I kind of look like an epileptic on crack, but during high energy moments like that, I have no fucks to give.

Interestingly enough, that’s what depression does, as well. It leaves you with no fucks to give, because all your mind can manage is survival. You cannot rise to the level of thriving, because that would mean you value yourself… and in those moments, you cannot. It is mentally impossible… or seems like it, anyway, and that’s the problem. Your mind plays tricks on you until believe your own bullshit.

• I can’t manage my life
• I will never be able to manage my life
• There’s no point in reaching out to people, because they don’t want to be around me, anyway.
• My crazy spatter will hurt other people, so it’s better to hide whether people want to see me or not
• Interaction with friends will not change how I feel about myself
• There’s nothing I can do to change my own mood
• The people in my life that genuinely don’t like me are right in their perceptions, and they are more important than how I perceive myself
• I will never amount to anything, because I do not have the tools to rise above the feelings I have about myself

Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. And yet, it feels real in the moment. The thing that saves me over and over is knowing that I am not the only person in the world that stuggles with these feelings, and there are resources that help, particularly a podcast called The Mental Illness Happy Hour. Paraphrasing Paul Gilmartin, the host, “it’s not a replacement for a therapist, more like a waiting room that doesn’t suck.” It makes my mirror neurons go off in the best way possible, because it’s so much easier to have sympathy for other people than it is to have sympathy for my own mental illness, and nothing bolsters my ability to adjust my perception to realize that a lot of people have it worse off than me, and I have the power to direct help their way, rather than sitting in my own desperate unhappiness.

But perhaps it is better to be myself as I am, rather than forcing the mask to appear. Leslie Lanagan™ is not leslie, and never will be.

I wrote a Facebook status years ago about slaying the dragon of emotional abuse, and one my friends replied, “what if you never have the chance to slay your own dragon?” I said, “then don’t slay the dragon. Slay the one they let grow in you.” Today I am feeling the tail and not the fire. But perhaps holding on to the tail is what will eventually allow me to fly.

Amen.

#prayingonthespaces

Now that you’re singing that song in your head, I will tell you that The Professor and I went to Busboys & Poets for breakfast yesterday, which is probably my favorite thing to do on a Saturday morning besides a pilgrimmage to Waffle House… although, to be honest, B & P has better grits, as sacriligious as that statement might be.

I found a Waffle House in Maryland so that I don’t have to go to BFE Virginia anymore… it was BFE Virginia coming from Alexandria, and from Silver Spring, you have to add an additional half hour to THAT. Plus, I don’t have a Z-tag for the toll road, which makes going to the Maryland location all the more irresistable. That being said, there’s not a book store at Waffle House, and if there was, I would be afraid of the contents. I might buy “The History of Waffles Abridged,” but that’s about it.

After The Professor and I finished breakfast, we were both tired and ready for a nap, so we went our separate ways. I took a nap, and then went to Best Buy, where I bought a cheap Blu-Ray player because I couldn’t stand not having Deadpool on disc… I could have just downloaded the movie, but I wanted all the extras and commentary. If you haven’t seen Deadpool, be forewarned that it is comically violent, and one of the funniest movies I’ve seen pretty much ever…. from the opening credits on. Plus, the Blu-Ray is wi-fi capable, so I get my laptop back… although let’s not get stupid. The Blu-ray also came with the DVD, so I copied it to my hard drive, anyway. It doesn’t take up that much space, and it’s the kind of movie that I need to be able to pull out when my day is turning into a shitshow.

…which reminds me of my favorite stupid joke. What do you call an animal park with only one dog? A Shi-Tzu.

Because The Professor and I didn’t get to spend much time talking, we’re getting together again tonight, just not too late because it’s a school night. I need to be in bed relatively early, because I stayed up way too late last night. Encoding Deadpool took almost an hour, then watching it took another two, then reading Hamilton took up another four. Yes, I am now on the Hamilton bandwagon, and there are so many things I never knew about him. He had such a garbage dump of a childhood that it’s amazing he was able to work through any of it, much less become the American statesman that he became later in life. I suppose that’s because he was truly a strident, there’s no crying in baseball kind of personality, where as I would still be hiding under my bed.

Reading Hamilton is kind of like the feeling I get when I think about going to HSPVA. Hamilton and the kids I went to school with are doing amazing things (Beyonce, Jason Moran, Justin Furstenfeld, Robert Glasper, Mireille Enos, etc.) and I have trouble finding my car at the mall. I mean, Hamilton helped write The Federalist Papers when he was younger than I am now.

Speaking of Beyonce, she actually left HSPVA after a year claiming that she didn’t need to be classically trained. I still think it worked out okay for her.

For those of you who don’t have any Jason Moran albums, get some. He was a senior when I was a freshman, and he was a jazz genius THEN. Now, he’s just as much of a legend as Wynton Marsalis, John Coltrane, Buddy Rich, et al. He’s a pianist, and one of the most sought after in New York. My favorite album that I listen to over and over is called “Ten,” but there are many more that are just as good. But the other albums do not have my favorite track, “RFK in the Land of Apartheid.” Sometimes when I’m writing, I just put it on repeat.

But if we’re going to talk about Houston artists, I have to tell a funny story about myself. We just got a new employee at DSI, and his name just happens to be Mike Jones. So I’m sitting next to one of my coworkers going, “do you know how hard it is not to just run up to him and yell, “MIKE JONES! 281-330-8004!” And said coworker goes, “you know he can hear you, right?” So I look at Mike and say, “I been sittin’ on that one for a WHILE.” #facepalm #dumbassattack

He told me that he gets it all the time… and laughed, thank God. I was really impressed, because I thought that Mike was obscure, but apparently both his album and the Chopped & Screwed remix made it all the way to DC.

I know that as a female, I should be offended by rap most of the time. But how can a writer ignore rap? It tells a story.

Just. Like. Me.

Whether it’s right or wrong, I think about Dana and Argo every day, multiple times a day. Again, right or wrong. It’s a little of both, because I think it is a way to giggle through grief and an outstanding defense mechanism. People don’t have to know me that well to know that I am not ready to move into the future fast, because I am still processing everything that happened, and I don’t do that quickly or easily. I loved the line The Professor wrote to me, that maybe it’s time that Atlas shrugged.

Maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t.

T-money was on my case about it last night, and it took me back to a sermon Dana and I heard preached by Ed Young on divorce. He took both a pink and a blue piece of paper, then used a glue stick to mash them together. Then, he tried to take them back apart, illustrating divorce that when you tried to separate the two, there were still scraps of pink on the blue paper and scraps of blue on the pink paper (Extrapolate! Extrapolaaaaate!). It doesn’t matter that our papers are both pink. There are still memories of Dana stuck to me, and I’m sure memories of me stuck to her.

I don’t write about Dana as often as I do about Argo because my relationship with Dana just ended. There was a fistfight, there was a set of emotional swings afterward that ate my bacon, and then I left. I thought with some passage of time, we’d be able to talk again. Then she came to DC both for her birthday and Christmas, and didn’t want to get together either time, even though I asked her to meet me at BofA so that we could separate our accounts. I didn’t think I was asking for too much, but apparently, I was.

Then, at Christmas, I sent Dana an e-mail that said I wanted to see her if she wanted to see me, that I was bummed she hadn’t reached out until I realized e-mail goes both ways, and it would have been a dick move on my part not to acknowledge her arrival.

Her sister wrote back to me, and the general consensus by then was “fuck them. Time to let her go.” So I did. Dana stories and movies come up for me all the time, most of them hilarious, because I don’t want to think about all the shitty things she said to me, especially after I got out of the hospital, which ranged from “you’ll never amount to anything” to “it must be nice to have health insurance so you can just check out like that.” The reality was so much more complicated. I’d spent the past two years dealing with the enormity of my emotional abuse, and then Dana pushed me, and I tried to fight back, but it didn’t work. I ended up on the floor, crying, when she hit me so hard that my glasses smashed into my face and at first, I thought my eye socket was broken, but after a few minutes, the pain went down into a manageable level and I realized it was just broken blood vessels. It compounded my PTSD exponentially, and sent my fight-or-freeze reflex into overdrive. Over time, I’ve just put my feelings for Dana into a box, not letting them affect me as much as my feelings for Argo, because since the divorce, there’s been on-again, off-again friendship that alternately had me wearing my heart on my sleeve and getting outrageously angry. Now I’m just back to wearing my heart on my sleeve, because I am tired of anger, tired of enmity, tired of all of it. I would rather remember her in all her hilarity than her anger…. mostly because I’d like to remember me that way, too, even though I still hurt for all the moments I hurt her. It’s so much easier to focus on the funny.

I love and miss her as much as it’s possible to love and miss someone you’ve never actually hugged… and again, if I have any regrets at all, it’s not making that happen early on, when we were still both in the dopamine rush of having met someone who just “got” us.

I wouldn’t have let my words swell into operatic proportions on the page, because I would have known all of her instead of just the face she presented to me… or not. I don’t know what would have happened, but I am willing to bet my life’s savings on the fact that it would have been damn near impossible to create such a world of secrecy had Dana, Argo, and I all sat down to a meal together.

The two biggest problems in my life at that time were Dana’s jealousy and her right to be jealous at the same time. It was not lost on me that it was threatening to hear that I was in love with Argo’s brain. My feeling is that it was what it was. Even if there was attraction on both of our parts once we’d met (and that is an ELASTIGIRL stretch I’m making), there would have been no reason to act, because my fidelity meant everything to me. I couldn’t be blind to other women, but I could be faithful.

It was reading over our e-mails to each other after Dana and I broke up and taking her words in a different context than she meant to send that got me in trouble, because both Dana and I thought there might be something there. I was dreadfully, awfully mistaken, but there was a part of me that knew I’d regret it for the rest of my life if I didn’t ask the question.

After it was answered clearly, I got it. I wasn’t angry, I wasn’t sad, I was accepting of it. Curiosity killed the cat, and that’s all I have to say about that. People have tried to prod me over and over into saying that I did move to DC just to see what would happen, and I can’t go there. I can’t make that leap. Argo was so angry with me that she couldn’t breathe, and I knew that the city was big enough for both of us whether there was reconciliation down the line or not. But I didn’t hope for reconciliation on the ground. I hoped for the type relationship we’d always had, the friends that e-mail every once in a while to check in and say, “I’m good, you?” To me, meeting Argo was as implausible as running into the President on the way to the Smithsonian… maybe less so, given the lengths to which I would go to meet the President and to avoid causing Argo any more pain than I already had… not to mention avoiding more pain caused to myself.

I gave as good as I got in all of our fights, because I am viciously flexible with words and so is she. I couldn’t imagine a scenario in which that would calm down enough for either one of us to say, “let’s go for dinner.” But what I know for sure is that the person who is verbally flexible on a keyboard is shy and just sticks to the funny in person, not wanting to go too deep unless the other person asks me a question, because I’ll always answer them. But I’d rather stay inside my own head and just talk about you. Because of this, lots of people get up from conversations with me saying, “wow… I can’t believe I told you all that… I never open up to anyone like I did with you.” Argo and I, in our quiet moments, told each other things that we’d never told anyone else, a closeness in the middle of the night when defenses are down, anyway. It felt like sunshine to be completely myself, her rays wrapping themselves around me until they got too bright. My cheeks hurt especially, because I could not help but add saltwater to sunburn.

There are so many levels to this story that I cannot add, because it would hurt more people than the two of us… and not only do I not want to hurt her, I don’t want to hurt anyone else, either. I have to think of my family at that time, which includes Dana’s.

But sufficed to say, it wasn’t Argo’s fault I began to burn… or, not completely. I have to remember that I can only take responsibility for my own actions, of which there were plenty. Even in DC, the plan was to stay off her radar and just make my own friends, hoping against hope that the things I did to try and repair my mistakes would at least put some dirt into the hole I’d dug… and it worked, for a time. I am very proud of myself that at least I can say I tried… that I tried to become the friend I couldn’t be when I was too enmeshed in my own mental health to see past it and into the damage I was doing to her heart, as well.

We caused each other’s heart to break in the way that only friend-hearts do.

So when T-money asked me if there was ever going to be a time in my life where Argo wasn’t in it, I could only answer a solid “I don’t know” and “maybe.” Because even if we never speak again, too many things were shared between us that I won’t forget. If nothing else, she was the first person to treat me like a real writer instead of just the Velveteen one… as if that was my calling in life and not the job I needed to stay alive.

I will always have jobs, but writing is my career… and anyone who helped me see it is going to be long in my memory….. loooooooooooooooooong.

I can always hope for resurrection in the middle of the mess, but I hope for it in the same way most people wish for a big blue box to show up on their front lawn, knowing that if it doesn’t, it’s just a future that never happened. Nothing to be upset about, nothing to be angry about, nothing to regret… because the future I was meant to have is already happening whether the blue box appears on my front lawn or not.

Because my other friends have never met Argo, in Portland, Houston, and DC, I have always compared her to The Doctor… and the look on Aaron’s face comparable to Rory’s when The Doctor and Amy walk up to him in the park.

However, I refuse to sit in the backyard with my suitcase packed.

So if talking about Dana and Argo as if they are my present, it’s not. It’s because they are my presents for a life well-lived. I made mistakes, and I own them, but that does not mean that at the time, they weren’t FANTASTIC.

I have really got to go to the drugstore and pick up some more caffeine pills. I used to take one when my alarm went off and then hit snooze once or twice, because 10 to 15 minutes is all it takes for it to kick in. I have to take sleeping pills to fall asleep, and it is non-negotiable, especially since the Nassers have dogs and if I am dead to the world, I don’t hear them in the middle of the night, or at their 5:30 AM wake-up. The pills are only 200mg, which is about a cup and a half of strong coffee… not enough to make my heart race, just enough to keep the Benadryl hangover at bay. This morning, I slept until 8:00 and threw on my clothes… interesting only because I went to bed before 10:00. Now that I’ve had some Hi-Caf tea, I’m all right, and it actually felt good to really get to relax. I’ve joined an e-mail aggregator called “BookBub” for iBooks and Amazon that lets me know when books go on sale and/or are free, and my Kindle is getting so much more use now that I’m getting three or four free books a day. So I fell asleep reading a mystery novel about a nun murdered in her convent. The murder has something to do with her past life before she became a nun, and the story is unfolding marvelously.

I have both pomade and face wash at the office, so I wear my Rice baseball cap and then “fix up” once I get here. It works out nicely, because I’m usually the first one here (in my department, at least). My Rice baseball cap is cute, but not nearly as much as my haircut. I didn’t want to show up to Pizza Night looking like a scrub, especially since “Aaron, Argo, and Dana” are going to be there. Argo used to play along, and it made me so incredibly happy.

Leslie: Pizza’s here. Diet Coke?
Argo: Make sure it is *loaded* with Jack.

Yes ma’am.

Next day:

Leslie: Argo! Jesus! What did you do to my office? It looks like you hosed down a wall!

Maybe I should have held her hair back, because that’s what friends do. 😛

The other funny story I have about “proverbial pizza night” is that I wrote in my blog that when I talked about Argo, I would just launch into these long ruminations that made Aaron eyeroll… so the next Friday, I sent her an e-mail that said we were all sitting around the table, drinking tequila because we’d run out of beer, and all I get back is, “hopefully Aaron can refrain from eye-rolling.” I nearly fell out of my desk chair I was laughing so hard.

See? That’s what I mean about giggling through memories instead of being angry.

So, I hope T-money doesn’t mind extra guests, but she shouldn’t, because they don’t take up much room. 🙂 Without their physical bodies, they can all sit on my shoulder at once… although the image of me trying to carry all three of them is friggin’ hysterical… because that is a lot of ass and a little shoulder, my friends.

I got the idea from “Eat. Pray. Love.” There’s this scene where Elizabeth Gilbert is trying to get her ex to sign the divorce agreement, and they go through all these people, living and dead, that have signed the agreement that she should be allowed to get divorced. They aren’t physically with her, but that doesn’t make them less important.

Speaking of important, I want to write about all the shootings that have been happening lately, but at the same time, I am overwhelmed to the point of exhaustion and tears. It would be cathartic to write something important that I could keep, and when I sit down to think about it, I just get ALL THE FEELS and I am paralyzed with analysis.

So for tonight, it is just time to enjoy pizza with friends, and put my worries off until I can think of something uplifting to say. Because right now, nothing about this situation feels uplifting at all. However, what I can say is that I am, as always, #prayingonthespaces………….

Amen.

It’s been a busy day, which is why you’re just now getting this……..

Walking around Dupont Circle was a trip down memory lane. The HRC store is gone, as is the lesbian book store, Lambda Rising. However, Larry’s Ice Cream is still going strong… and I got some after we had dinner at Bareburger. Yes, that’s really the name. The company was started in New York, which makes it even funnier that they put a restaurant called “Bareburger” with a menu with bears all over it in the middle of a gay neighborhood. It was absolutely delicious. Danni had The Original, because she said there were too many choices. I got the Southern Caviar burger, because it was bison with country bacon, stout onions, horseradish remoulade, and pimento cheese. Then we split sweet potato fries and kimchi slaw, which was just hot enough to make my sinuses relax. I am going to have to go back several times, because everything on the menu looks incredible. They even have a pickle fried chicken sandwich, which I imagine is like a Chik-Fil-A, but tastes better because it’s not made of breading and hatred My thoughts and prayers are with them…. the gay equivalent to “bless your heart,” the Texan equivalent of stuffing the “fuck you” way back down into your socks.

There’s a bar up the street from Bareburger/Larry’s that let you bring your own food in, so I took my ice cream (Decadence [a mixture of chocolate truffles] and Creme de Menthe with chocolate chips… Painters in… Not fucking around) and Danni ordered us rum and Diet Coke, which we drank while playing two games of Guess Who? and two games of Connect Four. We decided that next time we needed a group, because they also have Cards Against Humanity. Not sure I’m ready to show new friends how awful I am, but I guess I have to lay my cards on the table sometime, right? The best round I’ve ever won was “How did I lose my virginity?”

African children.

Hey, it was the best card I had in my hand…. and that’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it.

Not that I’m competitive or anything. No, seriously. I’m not. Unless we’re playing Trivial Pursuit. Then it’s ON LIKE DONKEY KONG. I am a fount of useless knowledge.

Autumn didn’t come with us this time, and it was good to get some hang time with Dan all my own. We decided that Bareburger is “our place,” because we discovered it together. She said she’d ask me before she brought anyone else there, and I said I couldn’t wait to get THAT text message. 🙂 And, she’s a woman after my own heart. The exact quote is, “I can always do burgers.” Yassss, qween. I’m down.

Next Saturday, I’m going with Dan, Autumn, and their group of friends to see Ghostbusters.

The Professor and I are still undecided as to what we’re going to do over the weekend, because we’ve found that the possibilities are endless, from touring Civil War battlefields to National Cathedral to the Portrait Museum. I’ve been to the portrait museum twice already since I’ve been here, because I just can’t get over the original Matthew Brady photos, and I will be one of the first in line when Obama’s portrait is added to the Presidents’ wing. I saw the portrait of the female justices, and it was okay. I didn’t not like it.

So, in short, we may do anything from going for coffee to road-tripping into southern Virginia… St. Bob’s country… shudder. I used to have friends that lived out in Manassas, but I’ve never seen the actual battle field, which I remember from U.S. History with Mrs. New in eighth grade because she said that people gathered with picnic baskets to watch, not realizing that there would soon be brains in their potato salad (Betcha didn’t think I’d remember that one, eh? [She reads my blog.]). I remember great lines, and that was one of them. She’s lucky I attributed it to her- good writers paraphrase. Great writers steal outright…. 😛

In other news, I saw from George Takei’s Facebook page that as an homage to him, they’re making Sulu gay in the next Abrams Star Trek movie. Gay people just look like people, so I doubt that it will change John Cho’s interpretation that much. However, I may have to fall asleep to “Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle” tonight. It’s only one of my favorite movies in the entire world.

And in my dreams, I’ll spend the night talking to Bryn. Boy, do we have a lot to say. That time difference, tho… But in the dream, I’ll have eight or nine hours to metaphorically drink coffee with her, so maybe the time difference is just in my head. Why can’t scientists create a way to visit alternate universes yet? You know, the one in which I live in DC and it’s right next to Portland?

One can dream. 🙂

Tonight I’m meeting up with Dan at the Dupont Metro station, and then we’re going to go and find something to do. I’m not sure what, but I’m thinking it will involve food. I’m, to quote George Carlin, “having the painters in,” and therefore my stomach is just a bottomless pit of need. Yesterday I had cookies and mini chocolate bars for lunch, because I’m an adult. No, wait. I had Newtons. A Newton is not a cookie. A Newton is fruit and cake.

I am one of those people marketers love.

For instance, I had to have an 1893 just because. It’s ok, but it doesn’t even begin to touch Fentiman’s Curiosity Cola, but to be fair, I have not tried the ginger version of 1893, either. I am not really a regular soda person, but I try new ones, especially on those days when I don’t care about calories… like today. Most of the time, I don’t eat much. On days that I am busy and then exhausted, I don’t eat at all. I just go straight to bed. It’s not the healthiest thing in the world, but by the same token, I eat whatever the hell I want, when I want, because I look at what I eat over a week instead of every day.

It’s nice not to be one of those women who obsesses over every calorie, and I’ve been that person. At one time in my life, I weighed 170, and I looked like a little teapot. I do not recommend the way I lost weight. I went on ADD medication and it suppressed my appetite so badly that I would cry in the grocery store because I couldn’t find anything that looked good. I wasn’t crying so much over emotion, just that everything in every direction made me feel a little nauseous. Then, I kept it off by losing the ADD meds and being anxious and depressed. It’s been a wonderful diet plan. #eyeroll

Samantha told me that she once said to Hayat, “does she ever eat?” It’s because I don’t sit down to meals. Neither one of them sees me grazing like a bird all day. Animal crackers are a serious part of my plan to stay alive… even though by the end of the bag, you’re mostly eating feet.

I’m sure all of this is wonderfully uplifting. I was once retweeted by Margaret Cho. Aren’t I important?

I’ve been twisted around all day thinking it’s Tuesday, and then I remembered I was supposed to meet Dan tonight when there were donuts and bagels on the office kitchen table. My time clock is off because of the long weekend, but it’s nice that I’m one day closer to another weekend than I would have been had there not been a deliciously dark and stormy 4th of July….. mmmmm….. Dark & Stormy……

I need to stop thinking about food and drinks because I had breakfast and second breakfast and I am about three minutes away from eating a box of donuts.

But what I really want is one of the mini chocolate bars I got yesterday at Starbucks. It was filled with chipotle peppers and pop rocks… It’s called a “Firecracker” in case you’re looking.

Looking forward, T-money is handling pizza night, home-made rather than store or restaurant bought, because I loved the toppings at Red Rocks but not the crust. It’s very thin and thus gets quite soggy in the middle, so you end up having to fold the slice over horizontally to keep everything from just dropping onto your plate… however, their sausage is off the chain.

Saturday or Sunday I am hanging out with Ms. INTP, whom I have decided to nickname “The Professor,” mostly because she used to be one. Now she’s into project management and studying for ITIL (which will make my Alert Logic readers shudder). We’re going to be tourists in our own city, either going to a museum or to Ford’s Theater, which I haven’t toured since I was eight. If there’s a root to moving back to DC, it’s that I’ve been awed by this place since then. Again, it’s hard for me to believe that I ever left. I don’t regret my decisions, because there are plenty of things that happened to me during my time away that I wouldn’t trade for anything, but at the same time, reminiscence and fondness tied together nicely when my dad said, “do you really want to remain in Houston?”

I didn’t, because the White House isn’t there. I checked.

 

It’s finally lunchtime after a long and productive morning. I’m ready to quit and get some perspective/rest before I go back at it. There are weekly and monthly processes that need to run, and both of them had to be done this morning. Nothing was hard, just time-consuming and thus, the need for a break. If I can get this blog entry finished quickly, I may even actually get up from my desk. 🙂 I usually don’t, because I like to have a solid hour of writing- it actually is my form of rest, because it’s engaging a different part of my brain.

However, today is a bit difficult because I’m not sure what to say. This weekend was delicious in its simplicity, but not much new to report except that I made another friend on OKCupid that is hella smart and thoughtful, an INTP that asks deep, probing questions… and I thought I was an intense personality. It felt good to have someone to write to that would answer with questions and answers that were equally thought-provoking and intuitive, as her personality dictates.

I sometimes come up as perceiving rather than judging, which I generally take to mean “you’re not as much of an asshole as you usually are.” I’ve used that line before, but it doesn’t make it any less true. Judgment is swift and doesn’t require as much thoughtful process as perceiving what is happeningi n the moment without comment. I am trying to lean into it, but, like Jesus, I also have my table-flipping moments. I don’t think there will ever be a time in which I completely cross over, but I can try.

There’s no limit to the things I am capable of learning if I try, so fingers crossed.

Yesterday, there was no one I wanted to tell more than Argo about this newfound writer, and it hurt knowing I should stay away, because not communicating has kept so much of my feelings about the situation at bay. I still pray for her all the time, and I figure that if I can keep doing it, forgiveness will continue to flow from me, and I won’t get as lost in anger, regret, and shame. I don’t wish to continue the pattern of escalated language on both sides, but I really miss the days in which we laughed, and oh, how we laughed.

It is way more fun to giggle at the memories of her, because while she does have a hard edge sometimes, she’s also kind of a goofball, and that’s what I miss the most.

But time does not go backwards, ever. I leave a door open for her just because I can, but that doesn’t mean she’d ever be willing to walk through it. I am sure that I, in some ways, should close the door and be done… but there are too many good memories to let them overtake the bad ones. I am just not that kind of person… the kind that constantly focuses on the negative so that it’s easier to let go of someone permanently. I tried, and it just didn’t work for me. It was much easier and inherent to who I am to focus on the laughter and let the pain float away, day by day, piece by peace.

She’s not the only person with whom I threw a match on a bridge, trying to walk away, but I don’t carry as much regret over the others, because they were relationships that needed to end. Perhaps this one does, as well, but I am not strong enough to say that to myself… at least, not yet. But I have stopped the practice of burning the candle at both ends trying to think of ways to rebuild the bridge we broke. That was killing little bits of me, because it was one step forward, two steps back, and over time, I realized that what had been torn asunder could not be rebuilt quickly or easily… there are only so many apologies you can make over e-mail, without the ability to look into each other’s eyes and see real emotion.

I just keep reminding myself that planes go both ways, and when Dana and I lived in Houston, there was nothing keeping her from coming to visit us just as easily as there was nothing keeping us from going to visit her. If we’d really wanted to meet on the ground, it would have happened by now.

And perhaps that is the saddest part of all, because I think it would have cleared up an amazing amount of bullshit very, very quickly. I think we both would have thought the other was funny and brilliant in a different way than could have ever been conveyed over e-mail, because I am a simple woman. It doesn’t take much to make me double over with laughter. It also doesn’t take much for me to tear up with remorse, and in some ways, I think Argo is owed that, rather than an apology in black and white… to be able to say in real time that I was in a very shitty place and I couldn’t handle my “stuff.” This is not to say that I don’t think she handled everything perfectly and I didn’t, just to say that I own my part in everything that went down.

The other thing I’ve learned over time is not to take too much responsibility, like apologizing over and over for her perceptions and not my reality… I was awfully hard on myself, and good at it, whether it was my deal or not.

But it took a long time to think all that through, because I have a tendency to take on every problem in every relationship, rather than realizing that I can only own 50 percent of a relationship and not all 100.

I’ve probably written sentences like this a thousand times, but said friend had been reading my blog and it opened that can of worms for me…. again.

But not in a bad way, just a re-realization that perhaps I can stop beating myself up quite so badly. I say things to myself that I’d never say to anyone else, and I have to ask myself the hard question of, “if you wouldn’t treat others like that, why do you do it to yourself?” In some ways, that answer is easy. It’s an ingrained pattern over years and years. Breaking it does not come overnight… but slowly, in the night, as I dream my way into wholeness.

In my dreams, Argo and I have the conversations we need to have so that I wake up with more clarity and not less. It is inconvenient, though, that I only hear the things I want to hear rather than the things she might actually have to say. But perhaps that would only open a door to more pain, and I’m willing to avoid that entirely.

If there’s any hope in this garbage dump of a situation, it’s that eventually pain will pass and either I will have peace within myself or we both will, enough to be able to talk without the spectors of who we used to be.

But I’m not holding my breath. I just think her feelings matter, and it is just as important for me to hear them out as it is for me to find peace within myself. However, knowing that these things are equally important helps me to know that I’m always going to be okay either way.

I look forward to more thought-provoking questions from my INTP friend, because it helps to provide perspective on my internal ruminations that may or may not feed into reality, and having someone call me out on it is a lifeline.

I just hope that I listen as equally well as I talk, because she is just as interesting as me, if not more so. I seem to do so much better one-on-one than I do in social situations with more people than that… I feel as if I can have a relationship with one person, or a relationship with a thousand when I’m up in front of them, because I can connect with an audience far better than I can connect with people at a party.

But in this era of new things, perhaps that is the next step… to stop being such a wallflower… because I come in two flavors. The life of the party for fifteen minutes and then I’m ready to go home, or the person that sits quietly in the corner hoping that no one notices me, because my “get up and go got up and left.” I also get nervous in person as opposed to writing because there is no delete key… no safety net.

For instance, at the Folklife Festival, Hawkeye and I were walking around and I saw this big wooden shack that said, “cheese smoking.” I said, “I wonder how they get the cheese to start smoking.” The joke fell so flat that I wanted to crawl into the ground, but I thought it was *hilarious.*

And on that note, I have to get back to work. See you on the flip side.

This is a video clip of me reading an excerpt from “A Letter to Someone Who Hurt You” at Sparkle, the queer spoken word event at Busboys & Poets every first Sunday. I am now somewhat regretting reading this piece, but not because it isn’t consistently in my top ten AND the most searched-for post internally. It’s because if you don’t know that I’m an INFJ preacher’s kid who wants to start a church of her own someday, I sound like a megalomaniac who had Adderrall for breakfast (for the record, I did not).

I suppose I also wanted to take ownership of the things I’ve done and left undone in a different medium. I’ve only read that piece out loud once, and that was in my therapist’s office. When I was finished, she said, “wow. You really know how to rip yourself a new one.” I said, “at my age, who else is going to do it?” I’m not a child anymore. Other adults do not have the right to correct me the way I have the right to correct myself. I’m kind of authoritative about it, but I take myself out for ice cream afterwards when I have to lay down my own law. There are just some things I will not tolerate out of me anymore, and getting fed up is part of being wiling to change.

I got an e-mail at 2:30 from my co-worker on Friday that said our boss (who was on PTO) had sent her an e-mail saying everyone in our department could leave at 3:30 as long as there were no production issues. From the office, I headed to T-money’s house (not the rapper) where we talked for a bit and then went to Red Rocks for pizza night, because there’s one in Columbia Heights as well. A cheap and delicious happy hour never hurt anybody. 🙂 After that, we ended up talking until I was fading fast, and I went home glad that I had that friend I could just call for “shooting the shit” type purposes… speaking of which, I need to call Scales and the Colonel… don’t let me forget. 😛

I stayed up late, so I woke up deliciously late. Then I went to the pharmacy to pick up my drugs, to the nail salon to get my eyebrows, fingers, and toes did, and to the Hair Cuttery for a much-needed touch-up. The last time I got a haircut, I asked the hairdresser to leave my hair long on the right-hand side, because I have a bald spot left over from an EEG contact as a preemie. It looked great, except that for some ungodly reason, she cut the left-hand side much shorter. It drove me batshit crazy, so when I went to the salon today, I told the hairdresser that I wanted to go full-on asymetrical, and to fade it up to my hairline on the left…. because it looks so much better now that it’s intentional instead of just looking like a really cheap haircut. In fact, the cut is so perfect that I don’t even need product, but when I got home, I put some Murray’s Superior Hairdressing Pomade in it, anyway, just for shine. It’s kind of a shorter version of Eleven‘s hair, of which I approve (But Ten‘s hair is so much cuter… but you see, mine goes to Eleven).

I’m not getting ready for anything special, just felt like treating myself today because I haven’t taken care of myself in a while. I even got acrylic nails so that the polish would last longer. It’s kind of a maroon color, to match both warm and cold colors. My toes are painted with a gun metal gray base coat and silver top coat, slick as a Bond Aston Martin. It just makes me feel good to look good, and my hair is especially cute with my nerdy Ira Glasses.

Tomorrow I’m going to The Mall with Hawkeye for the Folklife Festival put on by the Smithsonian, and then meeting T-money at Busboys & Poets for Sparkle, the queer spoken word event that I thought was on Friday (if you’re offended by the word queer, I’m sorry. I’m old and I can’t remember all the letters.).

As an aside, that reminds me of my mother, Carolyn, teaching me how to sing the alphabet song when I was a toddler. For the longest time, I thought the words were “A, B, C, D, E, F, Geeeee…. H, I, J, K, Carolyn N, O, P.” I was very physically delayed, and thus, precocious mentally because I had a lot of time to sit around and think about things, but that doesn’t mean that I didn’t mess things up once in a while. For the longest time, I also thought “The Little Drummer Boy” started out, “Come, Beethoven….” I am still not the best with lyrics. Even as an adult. I don’t remember how old I was, but old enough, but I found myself DYING of laughter during a worship service when we were singing “All Hail the Pow’r of Jesus’ Name” and I accidentally sang “angels prostate fall.” I couldn’t get the image out of my head and of course, when it is inappropriate to laugh, it makes me laugh even harder.

However, music is woven into my neurons, and even though I don’t remember lyrics to anything, ever, I can sing pretty much any melody I’ve ever heard. Lindsay is the lyrics person. I have people to do that for me. 🙂

Speaking of Lindsay, she and Matt are in Honduras right now and I asked them to bring me back a jersey. Lindsay said, “Soccer?” I said, “in my world there are no other kinds of jerseys.” Which is only funny because I have two football jerseys, as well. They were both Christmas gifts from Allyn, Dana’s mom, and they are priceless to me. One is Christopher Kluwe’s Vikings jersey, because when he started writing marriage equality blog entries in Minneapolis I had to have one. I also have Michael Sam’s Rams jersey, because I thought it was important to have the jersey of the first NFL player to come out publicly. I was crushed when he was cut, and when it was a possibility that he was going to be picked up by the Dallas Cowboys, I caused Dana such pain by saying I’d have to get a Cowboys jersey, too. You don’t tell a Redskins fan you want a Cowboys jersey. It’s just not done (however, Dana did give me leniency on the subject knowing that I’d grown up two and a half hours north of Dallas. If I’d been a bandwagon fan, I don’t think she would have married me in the first place . 😛 ).

I don’t know what position either one of them played, but I wear my Kluwe jersey often (my Sam jersey fits like a dress). When people ask me what position he plays, I say, “blogger.” If they say, “no, really,” I just stare blankly.

Yes, I know he was a punter. I think. But it’s much funnier my way.

I told Chris what I do when people ask me what position he plays, and he said, “LOL… works for me.” I’ve never met him, I just Tweeted him about it and was glad to get a reply.

Because it’s supposed to thunderstorm on Monday, fireworks are up in the air for DC (see what I did there?). However, I will tell you my fondest 4th memory of DC from 2001. Kathleen and I went to our friend Molly’s apartment building in downtown and there, from the rooftop, we watched the DC fireworks, with the Maryland and Virginia fireworks going off in the background. It’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen, and a memory that will stay with me forever, especially now that I’ve put it here.

Hawkeye and I should probably come up with an alternate plan in case it’s supposed to thunderstorm tomorrow, too, but we’ll figure it out. It’s a shame that in DC, there’s nothing to do.

😉

At the very least, we can admire my hair.

I mentioned a soldier in 48 Mondays that was deployed, and I won’t lie. When I heard she was back safe, I cried a few tears of joy at my desk. I’m not usually that weepy, but at the same time, I spent a long time praying for her safe return, and I was out of Lamictal, which generally makes me weepy and grateful. I was crying tears of joy over someone I don’t even particularly like, but it doesn’t take away from the fact that every time a soldier makes it home safe, I lose my snot. Actually, it’s an interesting dichotomy. I like her plenty. We’ve just been through too much to recreate friendship in a healthy way, because my past would be hung over my head til Jesus comes (look busy)…. And honestly, that’s ok. I can root for her from Silver Spring just as well as I can root for her anywhere else.

It was like hearing Hawkeye made it home safe from Kabul. We don’t know each other that well, but again, you get to walk to through the Heroes’ Walk, you deserve a standing ovation and tears and snot running down your friends’ faces, because in today’s world, it’s just a fucking miracle.

It is in that way that I feel sorry for intelligence and State, because they do just as much work to further our agenda overseas, but there are no parades for them. They are the Agents K and J of our generation, and many more before that. Off the grid because they have to be, just as when the plane hit the Pentagon, they tried everything they could to keep the focus on New York. It wasn’t that they were any less hurt, it’s just that the Pentagon works in secrecy, anyway. But that didn’t stop gawkers the first few weeks, before they got the partitions up and you could see the damage from the freeway, from literally turning off their cars on the left hand side of 395 and mourning. Getting into the city was a nightmare.

One of the members of our church at St. Mark’s was named Louise Bracher, and she did not live to see her daughter, Barbara Olson, lose her life in the attack on the Pentagon. Such a bright political pundit, even though I disagreed with her on damn near everything… but it changed her husband, Ted, in a major way. The same lawyer that argued Bush v. Gore was the same lawyer that argued FOR marriage equality, and I cannot imagine that his own loss of love did not play into it. I was not in the courtroom for the proceedings, but I wonder if he ever brought it up. It would have shed a whole new light on why he needed love to win. This is someone whom I also disagree with politically on nearly everything, but if I saw him in the city, I would have trouble not running up to him and giving him a huge hug and kiss on the cheek…. which would be awkward because we’ve never met, but I’d introduce myself and tell him what he meant to me before I asked him if I could hug him, and I might not be able to keep the tears from flowing, because I was standing outside the Supreme Court as the arguments were going on, and shook the plaintiff’s hands as they came down the steps.

Love Actually IS All Around.

As I have said before, I never thought I would see national gay marriage in my lifetime. Perhaps my children’s, should I’d ever had any. I suppose it is early yet, but not by much. And in other ways, I would not want to be pregnant. I’d hope that my partner would be down for it, because with my chemical imbalance issues, I wouldn’t want to pass them down. But then again, to paraphrase Leo Tolstoy, “every family is crazy in its own way.”

I agreed to be the “hostess” when Dana and I were married, because even though she reassured me that she’d probably be “fertile Myrtle” because of the ease with which her mother got pregnant, she was officially Not. Impressed. with the idea of being pregnant. We also talked about adoption, but I balked at it because I read long books on the subject and one of the things it brought up was that there were plenty of agencies that would take your money and close up in the middle of the night… money lost and no baby.

I would have wanted to adopt through the state, and one of the ideas Dana and I had was to adopt a pregnant teenager, so that we’d have stock in a baby, helping take care of it while our daughter finished school… and there are so few teenagers that get adopted, much less pregnant ones, that we were pretty sure we’d get “Insta-family” right away…. especially, and this is sad but true, if we were willing to adopt a minority.

Plus, from what I’ve heard, it’s much more fun to be a grandma.

Love Actually IS all around.

Especially when you realize that there is so much that can go wrong in the world, and you want so desperately to have things go right… and there are no shortage of 13-15 year old pregnant girls that need help in the worst way. I am to the point in my life where as long as my job was stable and I was debt-free, I could afford to adopt on my own… and perhaps that is the answer for me at some point, as long as I can afford a housekeeper… because it wouldn’t be just me. It would be my daughter and the mother of my grandchild and me… which sheds a whole new light on single-parenthood, because I wouldn’t be the only single parent in the house.

But these are just dreams, not reality, the future I can see that might not happen, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea in my head… whether it’s a good idea in practice is a whole other thing. But the futures that do not happen are just that, thanks to The Doctor.

The Doctor has explained more about letting go of guilt and shame to me than just about anyone or anything. Letting go of a future that didn’t happen is much easier than torturing myself over the past.

And on that note, it’s time to get back in line for a refill on coffee and get to the office. Today is Friday, which means that I will be entirely slammed all day, but it is not unwelcome. I like getting out of my head.

But the thing that remains is that a soldier came home from deployment, and will enjoy many more days with her family, and I can stop being afraid that she won’t. If that is not gratitude for the power of the universe, I don’t know what is.

Because Love Actually IS All Around.

It was an exciting day to be a Lanagan in this town on Tuesday. Lindsay and I went to a Japanese restaurant that served Tsukemen ramen, something I’ve been wanting to try since David Chang introduced me to it in season one of “The Mind of a Chef.” I took down that noodle bowl in a matter of minutes, and we also had fried chicken bao. OMG. And, of course, we couldn’t help but order the Hello Kitty cocktail, which I don’t remember all of the ingredients, but used Calpico to turn it pink. I used some of my PTO so I could pick Lindsay up at the airport, which was good because we were able to get seats at the bar immediately. There are only 27 seats in the entire restaurant, so on nights and weekends, the wait is usually two hours. The restaurant is called “Toki Underground” for my friends who want to try it. Lindsay got curry ramen, and it was different than mine, but just as good.

The difference between regular ramen and Tsukemen is that the noodles and the broth are served in separate bowls, so that the noodles remain a little al dente and don’t continue to cook in the soup. You take a few strands at a time and dip it into the sauce and eat it as quickly as possible, because the broth is boiled down into a very salty base and you don’t want it to soak in… you just need a quick dip. 🙂

For dessert, we had fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies with a salt and caramel dip and half-n-half on the side for dipping. Lindsay found the restaurant while she was on the plane, and our meal couldn’t have been more perfect. I will definitely be going back, because now that it’s on my radar, I basically had the Roger Smith reaction… “what is this and how can I change my blood to it?” (Editor’s Note: It’s from the episode where Stan is passed over to speak at the Republican National Convention and decides to join the Log Cabin posse, and of course, they dress him and teach him how to make a proper cocktail.)

After that, we went back to Lindsay’s hotel, so full we couldn’t even move. I laid on her bed until I could get up and drive myself home. It took a little while. 🙂

T-money checked out a copy of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close to me from her library, and I managed to get about halfway through it before we talked for two hours straight. She told me that she told someone that I’d nicknamed her T-money on this web site, and the person said, she gave you a rapper’s name? Yes, but unintentionally, as A-train, L-train, A-money, and L-money can attest. She’ll probably get another nickname as time progresses, one that reflects her personality, but I don’t know her well enough to make that leap yet. I mean, “Curly” might be appropriate, but that reminds me of Of Mice and Men, and that is Just. Not. Happening.

Friday night we’re going to an open mike at the original Busboys & Poets, but I don’t know that I’ll actually read anything. It depends on whether other people read prose or not. When I picture spoken word, I picture poetry with a beat, like in So I Married an Axe Murderer. I’ve never written anything like that, and I don’t know whether it’s within my capabilities or not. But in this phase of trying new things, I may not get up in front of people, but I might start a loop at home and see what comes out. It wouldn’t NOT be good for me. We shall see what we shall see. Plus, my friend Scott set a high, high bar when I used to go and watch him. If it’s not Scott-ish, it’s CRAP. My favorite started out Miss Carrie is so very… and now that it’s been 20 years, that’s the only line I remember. But I do remember being intimidated by his brilliance.

Today Ops is having an Egg & Spoon race, which is just one of the reasons I love my job, because today is also donut day. Donuts in the morning and a game in the afternoon. It doesn’t get any better than this. I’m in charge of putting together the games, so I looked at the web site where I order our trophies and this was one of the games in which you could actually buy a trophy for it. So I think I’m just going to keep going down that list until I hit things that we can’t possibly accomplish, like baseball. I mean, we probably could play baseball, but I can’t picture it going well. We’re Geeks.™

All of this new activity is helping my pain move down the Z-axis, as I have mentioned before, and I’m glad of the distraction. But it’s still hard to close my eyes without dreaming of my old life, and just how perfect it used to be until the walls came tumbling down. Perfect in all its flaws, failures, and vulnerabilities, that is. T-money asked me if I thought there was a chance that Dana and I would get back together. I used to keep a door open until I realized I could never go back to someone who would hit me like that, and the phrase “pick on someone your own size” doesn’t even begin to cover it. It is true that when she pushed me, I went off like a chihuahua with a Napoleon complex, which doesn’t excuse my behavior in the slightest, because I should have realized that this was not going to end well and just run away. But survival instinct took over, and I couldn’t walk away from a fight. I’m just not very good at that… but getting better as I mellow with age.

Reacting with anger to anger has never worked out well for me, but the survival instinct is in place from years of it being wired into my neurons. I don’t know what it will take to get rid of that instinct completely, because if I pop off at a church committee or something like that, I am not only defeated, but possibly fired. In some ways, I think pastors are too expected to be perfect, without being allowed to have a full range of emotion. You have to meet rage with “let’s think about that,” like the forced smiles of McDonald’s employees.

You have to be able to take a step back, and see where their rage is coming from, and have enough clinical separation not to take it personally, even when the other person is trying to get under your skin with ad hominem attacks. Speaking of which, that’s a good correlation to the relationship I had with Dana in our last couple of years of marriage. When we talked about money, I needed facts, not accusations against my character. If I’d had enough foresight to see it for what it was, we might still be married today. But no, my survival instinct was so wired that her escalated language escalated me and vice versa… and I am not immune to the fact that it was the way Argo and I fought as well. My best hope for myself is to learn this clinical separation so that even when other people are trying to rattle me, they’ve lost the ability.

In a very real sense, Argo already has. After not communicating for a while, I realized that there was never a time in which she wouldn’t bring out the big guns, her stalker shit that never turned into anything. Of course you can harass people over the internet, and I take nothing away from the shitty things I said to her, but at the same time, we have a shared responsibility for shittiness at her own admittance. Because our pattern is so entrenched, I don’t know whether or not she could rattle me anymore. I just don’t. But what I do know is that I have stopped paying attention to her shitty accusations and it has made all the difference in my self-esteem, because I know what is true and what is not. E-mail cannot possibly convey more than seven percent of a person’s personality, and for us, the other 93 is lost to history… I think. We’ve both said “never again” so many times that it has lost its meaning… so maybe we mean it, and maybe we don’t. Only time will tell. I can’t promise that it would be easy not to lapse into old patterns, but what I can promise is that I’ll never stop working on it… but it can’t be a one-way street. She has to stop wanting to get under my skin in an equal sort of way.

But even if we never speak again, she’s forgiven completely and absolutely, because it might not change her, but it certainly changes me. I am glad to get away from all of her anger at me, glad to get away from the e-mails that just cut us both off at the knees, glad to get away from the weight all that pain put on my shoulders. In this relationship, no good deed has gone unpunished, and I mean that on both sides of the equation. I am not immune to negativity, but I am also not the person she has made me out to be, because she only knows less than a tenth of who I am. For instance, I think she thought that by moving here, I wanted her to be my support system. That was true when we were getting along like gangbusters, but by the time I ACTUALLY moved here, we weren’t even speaking and I’d made my peace with it. I feel bad that she was scared of my move, but I am not responsible for those feelings, because I had my own set of friends, my own roommates, my own everything.

Everything became new again, and for that, I am grateful.

Amen.

There’s really no better feeling than being single and not worried about it. I feel that too much emphasis is put on being coupled, when in reality, most people get married before they even know who they are. I heard a great “This American Life” episode that spoke to it this weekend. It’s called “Choosing Wrong,” and the first few minutes talks about both relationships and work, and how we are so likely to choose wrong in both of those directions because we expect to take on these gargantuan tasks (finding work and people we love) using only intuition… and a complete lack of cognizance on our parts as to where we might really fit into both of those things. For instance, most people get married without knowing the ways in which they are annoying to live with (shut it), and that living together before marriage doesn’t even bring out these tendencies. Most people have to deal with their failed expectations, and don’t realize that there’s so much of the time that you’re not sure you chose the right person, because the miracle isn’t in the intuition. It’s in the dedication… the same could be said of work. Even the jobs we love come with days where we wonder if we’ve made the right choice, and a lot of times we are not prepared to deal with that reality. It takes a gargantuan “it gets better” campaign to get through one’s career and love life.

It resonated with me because I knew there was an “it gets better” campaign in my marriage to Dana somewhere, but I failed to find it in time. I don’t think either one of us were prepared to deal with loneliness, even when the other was home. I don’t think either of us were wired to deal with all our failed hopes and dreams as to who the other person really was. We all can accept our partner’s outstanding parts… it takes a leap of faith to accept their downright dirty ones…. and we all have them, even me.

There was nothing I wanted more than for my life to go back to the way it was, with Argo and Dana and me all able to make room for each other and for the wiggy “more than a friend” feelings for Argo to go away for me so that I didn’t have to deal with them anymore in the context of my attention being better divided between the two of them, because as Argo and I descended into a world of secrecy, I couldn’t help but let my attention be diverted, because it wasn’t that Dana didn’t need me and Argo did. It was that Argo needed me more right then. We were lost in our own little world for far too long, and then when Argo said to make sure Dana saw all, I showed it to her… and it made Argo so mad she said she’d never forgive me for it. I didn’t understand… I was lost and hurt because she told me to tell Dana everything, and when I did, she slammed the door in my face. It didn’t start out that way, but it became a major divide and conquer op on both sides. Tell Dana, but don’t. I’m ok with Argo being your friend, but I’m not. My fatal mistake was putting Argo and Dana on the same level, trying to please them both all of the time. I spent a lot of time mystified at all of our behaviors, with not enough time in the day to realize making both of them happy and keeping myself happy, too. Aaron and Dana will both tell you that I was a fucking mess. The only thing that really kept my sanity intact was that they occupied completely different parts of my brain, and never crossed over. There were plenty of times when I was with Dana that I thought about/talked about Argo, and plenty of times with Argo that I thought about/talked about Dana. But there was never a time in which I wanted that marriage and that friendship to fall apart, until I got so anxious that I didn’t know what to do. I could think of them as completely different people and situations… the crossover came in the verbal processing about them, because I needed a place to go with my feelings about both of them.

To her credit, Argo never got tired of hearing about Dana (except for when she thought I was making excuses, and I thought I was giving her context for comprehension), but Dana sure as hell got tired of hearing about Argo. I thought I had an open line with both of them to say what I was feeling, and in retrospect, I did not. I also did not have the abiliity to bottle up my emotions and just ruminate about them in my head, because hearing their insights helped me immensely. Sitting and thinking alone led to descending into depression. Hindsight is always 20/20, because as Søren Kierkegaard once said, “we live life forwards, but we understand it backwards.” In that way, I now know that I was out of my mind not to get a therapist so that there was someone listening to me that didn’t have a horse in the race. Talking to Sarah, my therapist at Vesta, was the first time in which I felt true relief, because she was able to show me ways of lifting myself out of rumination, out of sadness, etc… but writing has also helped, because as any therapist will tell you, you don’t get better one hour a week.

I am also one of those people that will use a thousand words when one will do.

I am sure that I cut both Argo and Dana to the quick with both of them, which just feeds my intuition that this is not the right time for a relationship. However, I am not opposed to going out with people and seeing if we have that “friend-click” that could turn into something down the road. If I think hard about my relationship with Dana, I come up with the answer that in our own way, we were 1930’s courting in our own best friend kind of way. There were times when we could read each other better than we could read ourselves… and very possibly, that was our undoing.

Dana “just knew” that she was losing me to Argo. There were two problems with that. The first is that I didn’t feel that way, and never would. The second is that Argo didn’t feel that way, either. I saw my feelings for Argo as inconvenient and foolish… even more so in retrospect because of the bleeding heart it caused on both fronts. You can’t win a war on two fronts, and it certainly felt like I was fighting one. Fighting to keep my head above water, mostly.

Argo began to see my defense mechanisms as threat, and I don’t really blame her. It’s just all so fucking sad. What I wouldn’t give to be able to just have said, “I’m anxious,” without it coming across as fits of rage that no one deserved, especially me… because I didn’t hurt Argo nearly as much as I hurt myself. Shame and regret are both horrible, horrible things, and I have a lot of both to slowly work through over time. She wasn’t emotionally equipped to see the anger for what it was, and shouldn’t have to have been, anyway. I should have been able to manage my own emotions, but I wasn’t, and the pattern became entrenched unless we stuck to “ladies who lunch” type topics. Over time, anything I sent, no matter what it said, was either ignored or taken as a gutter-snipe even when that was the furthest thing from my mind… but she’d respond with escalated language, anyway, and instead of writing it off, I’d just escalate even more, because my sense of injustice would just boil and I’d try to give her a taste of her own medicine… and even though it’s painful to admit, negative attention was better than no attention at all… choosing the wire monkey that had once been covered in soft, thick cloth.

That worked out well for me, as you can see even if you’re a casual reader. And by “that worked out well,” please know that if this is your first entry, you can read that dripping with as much sarcasm as you can muster.

It’s why I’m deathly afraid of choosing wrong, no matter what kind of love a relationship entails. I don’t want to fight with my friends, either… which is why I’ve spent so much time “in the desert,” not willing to branch out and make any new friends, sticking to the ones I had before I moved here in the first place… or going to church, where every relationship was intellectual but not emotional… or at least, if it was, you could have measured the emotion with a teaspoon.

I isolated so much that even my roommates didn’t see me for days at a time… married to my own thoughts and how to direct them into something better for myself. I may not be able to solve all of my issues, but at least I have a grip on what they are.

Day by day, I am choosing right.

I just got back from kayaking and my shoulders are so sore I can hardly move. There’s going to be some Advil in my future when the beer wears off. I went to Dogfish Head for lunch considering how many times I’d passed it and never gone in, and had a lovely pairing of grilled mahi-mahi tacos and fresh peach, summery ale. I’m very seasonal about my beer, lest anyone think that I am only a “bitch beer” kind of chick. Let’s save the stouts for snow, shall we?

I was so embarrassed that I was late this morning. I actually got there early, but I didn’t know you needed $3.00 to get into the park and who carries cash anymore? So I had to go and get some, and then the signage within the park was so poor that I must have driven five miles before I actually found the boathouse. The good news is that I took to kayaking like a fish to water. Never overturned my boat, mostly because I looked up tips on the internet before I left the house. Apparently, the stroke is “toes to butt.” I had a great time, and my date paid for everything… I thought we were going to lunch afterward, so I was going to return the favor by treating her… She said she had some chores to finish, which I do not know if it is code for “I have to finish my chores,” or perhaps, “I’m just not that into you.” Either way, I had a great time, and I’m not worried. She’ll text back or she won’t (I sent her a text message saying that I had a great time and it was so sweet of her to invite me). I was looking forward to lunch, though, because there’s only so much talking you can do on a boat (motherfucker).

My insecurity says that she took one look at me and decided I looked like a ten-year-old. My ego says that I’m awesome, and just because she didn’t see it, that’s not my problem.

Yeah, let’s go with that.

Yesterday’s date was much more fun and lasted a lot longer, because neither one of us could stop talking. But it wasn’t really a date, because I’m not the type person that wants to jump into anything quickly.  I told her that friendship was what I had to offer, and she told me that might be  hard, which was a great ego boost and nothing else. I need to enforce boundaries with everyone I go out with, because I’m Just. Not. Ready. Not ready to give up any part of myself to someone else, because the pieces that have left me over the past year or so haven’t scabbed over. The bleeding has stopped, and there is a Band-Aid (brand name, not Dollar Tree crap) over them, but the cuts still feel fresh enough that letting myself invest in someone else is not quite an option.

With the woman yesterday, there were clearly some compatible wounds, which set off my weird-spirometer in a hurry, because that is my past and not my future. I have also made the promise to myself that Agape and Eros should not cross, and it may take me a while to break those walls as well. Because, of course, now that my boundaries in place, they are quite iron-clad. I never want there to be another Argo, period.

It’s going to take a lot to get my boundaries down, even when I am ready. I thought I had trust issues before, and now I have them even worse, because I don’t want to cause harm to anyone and I don’t want anyone to cause harm to me. But the thing is, Agape and Eros are supposed to cross in the right relationship, just presumably not with a a straight girl. But it doesn’t matter right now. Those boundaries cannot cross too soon. With Dana, it took 3 and a half years, because the relationship before her was classic Agape and Eros crossing even when we both knew they shouldn’t and we did it, anyway. It put my heart into a blender.and it gave me plenty of time to think about what I wanted the next relationship to look like. Turns out, I want to marry my best friend…. If the two people I’ve already got domestic partnerships with will real ease me from them. It’s getting time to file on my own, because now I don’t believe that Dana will take care of it as she said she would, and I know that Kat just wants me to claim abandonment because she married a man three months after we broke up and I haven’t heard from her since. I’m not even sure that her current husband knows about me, but it wouldn’t be hard to find out if you knew both of our last names.

I never should have taken the legal advice just to let it go, but hindsight is always 20/20. There’s no way that national gay marriage could have been predicted in 2002.

And that’s what I was thinking as I was driving home from kayaking. This dating thing is so much harder with two domestic partnerships now hanging themselves over my head like rain clouds, fluffy and full. In a sense, I already have two wives. What it God’s name do I want with a girlfriend?

Mostly just the first and last call of the day.