I love my coconut tea so much…. although today I might have overdone it. Three teabags for a 20-oz and my heart is beating fast. I think I created a hot Monster 2x, which was perfect for me in the kitchen, but sitting at a desk is extraordinarily hard. At least my typing is faster. 🙂 I can tell you about a lot more things in a very little amount of time, like how the traffic was a clusterfuck this morning because of an accident and the Metro overhaul that’s causing so many more people to buy cars and/or take Uber. I believe that I got a car at just the right time, because the overhaul is going to take a year, and the red line is the most affected, as is the orange line, the two lines I need to take to get to work in the morning. Not being able to predict when I got to work would kill me, because I make it my mission in life to be early. Today I was right on time- 5 after- so the building was actually open when I got here. No having to go anywhere to kill time.

I notice that my queries are taking a long time to complete this morning, so I decided to break for lunch while they were running since I slept late this morning. I usually get up at 0600, but I just wasn’t feeling it today. For some reason, my medication had more trouble wearing off than it normally does, so I slept as late as I could until my Waze notification went off and said that traffic on 50 was going to add 15 minutes to my commute. I skipped having a shower because it was going to take more than 20 minutes to get here, but I don’t regret it. I had a shower yesterday, and especially in the summer, I don’t shower as often because it really, really dries out my skin. The only thing I didn’t do that I wish I had was wash my face and rinse my hair. No spikes this morning, just my Rice baseball cap… it’s really washing my face that matters, because I try to use salicylic acid twice a day to keep my acne/rosacea at bay. I also forgot to put benzoyl peroxide all over my face and bangs (free highlights), but no matter. I can do that when I get home, and put on a white t-shirt to do it.

I had to buy some new t-shirts yesterday because of this very problem. I forget that I’ve just “fixed my face,” put my t-shirt over my head, and voila! The color is now faded and my cool t-shirts turn into boot-polishing rags (speaking of which, that needs to get done PRONTO.) All of my heroes since 2001 have been military, and it was DrReval (he’s actually a major, but who can pass up THAT nickname) and Volfe have impressed the importance of boot shining on me so that it’s now a thing. I haven’t even worn my Docs in three weeks because I won’t wear them unpolished. I also need to take my brown Chucks to a shoe hospital because the stitching has come loose and I am not ready to get rid of them. This is because they are the only brown leather shoes that I own… throwbacks to the original Chucks that look AMAZING with either saddle soap or brown polish. The best analogy I can give as to what they look like is that they are made from the same type leather as the helmets in “Leatherheads.”

I also bought some black Chucks on Amazon where even the rubber is black, but they are cloth. I also put some heel cups in them when I read an article that said Chucks were as supportive as “glorified socks.” Next time I order Chucks, I’ll have to get them at least one size larger so that I can put sports supports in them…. which I meant to do this time and totally forgot…. but they go nicely with my TARDIS/Dalek suspenders, so I can’t complain too much…. and if you have to ask why they coordinate, you need to get on Amazon and watch Doctor Who. It will dawn on you in the second season. I won’t even wear my Doctor Who t-shirts without my Chucks, even though Matt Smith is my Doctor…. I doubt I would look good in a bow tie and fez.

Clara: One of these days, you’re just going to be able to walk past a fez.
The Doctor: Never gonna happen.

David Tennent fans seem to get very upset when I say that Matt is my Doctor. Let’s clear that up right now. Shut it.

I loved Matt from the beginning because he was such an underdog. When he was cast, no one said he could do it, and he’s made some of the most brilliant episodes in the entire cannon. If you can make it through “Vincent and The Doctor” without squalling your eyeballs out, you are officially a sociopath. My other favorite Matt episode is called “Nightmare in Silver,” because the Cybermen have found a way to implant small extensions into The Doctor’s face, and his real personality is fighting it out with his Cyberman personality in a good versus evil monologue that deserved an Emmy. Matt acting against himself was so amazing that I watched that one scene three times in a row.

And adding Alex Kingston to the cast was briliant because I’ve been in love with her since ER. Pretty sure anyone my age feels the same way.

Now that I’m done with my Doctor Who tangent, I have to tell you the funniest t-shirt I bought. It’s Darth Vader walking AT-ATs on a leash like dogs. Since I work in IT, I’m wearing it today and it is *very* popular. I got some other cool ones, but they aren’t characters. The second best one is in the style of Ocean Pacific and has a bear surfing at day’s end. The last two are both striped- one is highlighter yellow with grey stripes across the middle of the chest, and the other is navy with green pinstripes… all cheap because I shop in the little boys’ department, where t-shirts are usually between 5-8 bucks. I am not stupid. I am not paying $25 for one t-shirt, no matter how soft it is…. unless I am given a gift certificate. 🙂

Today the gift was being reminded of the “L___nator,” a Facebook memory where she helped me fix my car. God I miss her- my little ray of Internet sunshine.

it’s good to have memories like this every day. It reminds me that grief isn’t all bad, that sometimes there are lots of smiles held within. It gutted me like a fish when she said she was pulling chalks, but at the same time, I’m a handful. I don’t expect people to stay my friends if they don’t wanna. I’m not going to chase her down- the people that have stuck by me over the years mean so much more…. and that is the beauty of life… letting go of the people who don’t want to walk with you on your journey to make room for those who do.

But sometimes, just sometimes, when the question is asked, silence will fall… and what is the question? What do you do when you’re still sad that people have walked away even though the people who want you in their lives will make a point of reaching out? I suppose silence is the best answer of all, because eventually, if you walk in the dark long enough, you realize that it is a passage into light and darkness is not a permanent destination…. even when it really, really feels like it.

I was thinking about yesterday, when I said that the archetype for my new girlfriend is me, and just how narcissistic that sounded, just not in my head…. because I wasn’t thinking of me when I said it. I was thinking of someone else that looks sort of like me, and yet, is not me…. and no, Scales, I am not talking about your precious colonel, although I am sure she’s a catch and a half. No, I was thinking about someone who was standing next to Dana in a photo and Sam mistook her for my wife, saying, “I just thought your wife would look more like you.” And that’s when I realized that the woman in the picture did look a little like me, but it was more than that in terms of becoming an archetype. It was the way she carried herself in the world, which is not like me at all.

They say that opposites only attract in the short term, but I’d give anything to find someone that strong and that vulnerable all in the same package. Maybe that’s why I’ve gone out of my way to look for people in the military, because what I have found is that I like their strength in the outside world and that vulnerable space that’s only for me.

Perhaps that’s also part of leaving Argo behind, because she’s tough as barbed wire, but in our rabbit hole there was a vulnerability and poignancy to her words that still run through my mind a lot. The house I built for her in my head is slowly coming down, but there are still a a lot of bricks. Today the memory was her saying I love you for some reason or another, because the reason doesn’t matter. The fact that she was vulnerable enough to say it does.

I have two minds on that. The first is that she never should be expected to stay my friend no matter how bad it gets. The second is that love letters are the campaign promises of the soul. Even friends with an explosive connection have a honeymoon phase, and this was no different. She said that no matter what I confided in her, there was nothing I could do that would make her love/like me any less, and I tested that boundary until it broke, because I’m not sure that I felt worthy of her from day one. I pushed her away before she could even think about doing it to me, because I didn’t think I was worth her time.

But I was, and she showed it to me every day, and I was an idiot for not watching and listening much closer than I actually did. I have no choice but to move away from this experience, because she says that she really does think it’s better that we don’t communicate, and I see her point wholeheartedly and support it. The less we interact, the less chance there is for something to come out of either of our mouths that can be misconstrued as wrong or bad or any number of things that will set one of us off like a ticking time bomb.

It’s why I’m trying to look forward so hard, because I need to move into a different place emotionally now that I’ve had enough time to physically move and get my bearings. I am nothing if not resilient when it comes to moving, because being a preacher’s kid, I never lived anywhere longer than five years before my father left the ministry when I was 17. The place I’m in is sometimes happy, but as Aaron says, “I don’t have to make room for grief. Grief makes its own room.”

And in the fullness of blessing and releasing, God of the Universe, protect my precious Argo………………….#prayingonthespaces

I may have to bless and release every day for a while, but what does it hurt to pray for someone and wish them well even when they don’t talk back? It helps me to forgive me, regardless of what energy comes back…. but I would like to believe that the more I put positive energy into the universe, the more I open myself up to receive it.

And one day I will open my eyes, having woken up to the next great love of my life, because I will be at peace.

If you say it loud enough, I’m pretty sure it’s onomatopoetic.

The first person that tried to match with me on Match.com was a therapist in private practice. I don’t even know how to respond to that, so I won’t. But in my head, it went something like, “wow. Talk about biting off more than she can chew…” Although to be fair, most people in mental health struggle with mental health themselves, because that’s what made them interested enough in it to make it a career in the first place. So, there’s two red flags… the third is that I just wasn’t that into her. She’s working on a doctoral dissertation and seems hella smart, but the attraction piece just wasn’t there.

But to her credit, there’s an archetype in my mind already, and she didn’t fit it.

And no, the archetype is not Argo or Dana.

It’s me.

No, seriously. I want my next girlfriend to be about my size and about the same amount of genderfluid… because sometimes I like boys’ clothes and sometimes I like makeup and ho clothes. It just depends on the day. Sometimes I like looking sharp and crispy, sometimes I like making people’s jaws drop with my cleavage.

Now, because I’ve said this, I can assure you that my next girlfriend will be at least six feet tall. That is because a spark is a spark and I don’t get to choose when it happens… Except looking through pictures on Match and Tinder…. which will invariably be no help because I am way more likely to run into someone at Whole Foods…. and by run into them, I mean literally. Just trip over them and fall ass over teakettle because I’m not paying attention to anything but peanut butter.

I hate buying peanut butter at Whole Foods. It takes me at least half an hour, because I hem and haw and threaten to go to Safeway and then realize I am way too tired to put in that much effort and just try to find the one with the least amount of oil on top, because when it says “no stir,” they don’t mean it. “Less stir” is about as good as it gets. I finally settled on the smallest jar of 365 brand chunky I could find, because I was completely out of peanut butter, but didn’t want to buy so much of it that I would feel bad about throwing it out when my happy ass finally did find the SuperChunk.

I pretty much live on peanut butter and banana sandwiches, veggie hot dogs/sausages, and Daiya cheese. Occasionally I’ll throw some eggs into the steamer basket of my rice cooker because they hard boil in about 16 minutes. But I am too wrapped up in my own head to cook anymore. It used to be such a major part of my life, and now I can’t remember the last time I made something. Oh, yes I do. Last fall I made some polenta cakes with a dried cherry and balsamic reduction.

I also have both the cinnamon raisin and regular Ezekiel bread, for sandwiches and for toast. Cinnamon raisin bread is amazing as a brown-sugared ham sandwich.

I don’t buy meat or dairy very often because I generally won’t use it before it spoils. Thus the obsession with cheddar Daiya.

My one impulse buy was that I saw they had 12-packs of chocolate milk boxes that didn’t have to be refrigerated and I thought they’d be perfect for driving into work. I am sure that they are for children. I am also sure that I don’t care. I drive a Yaris. It looks like I’m playing with Hot Wheels, anyway.

I wish I’d met this therapist on Tinder (remember her?), because you don’t have to pay to talk to people. If I’d met her on Tinder, I would have at least said “let’s go for coffee.” Because even though she’s not someone I could picture myself dating, it never hurts to have smart people in your life. I should know. I have plenty.

 

 

 

Yesterday I talked to Bryn on the phone, and I was telling her how small my past made me feel, and then I allowed myself to get angry, because angry is easier to deal with than sad if you let it temper you instead of burn you from the inside out. I know I’m just a nerd with a journal, and so do my other friends. In terms of Argo’s feelings about me, I just need to stop participating, because when her words get under my skin, the worthlessness loop starts running and Boo Radley has nothing on me… and not because I feel like I need to be a hermit out of fear. I feel that I need to be a hermit because I don’t deserve happiness.

Or, as I so eloquently saw it put on Facebook today, never go looking for happiness where you lost it. This insistence that I am some sort of dark character has got to go, and that won’t come from continuing to worry about my relationship with Argo and how to make things right, because her mind is made up. What’s done is done, and I can change her mind as easily as I can change my eye color… and yes, I realize that I could get different-colored contacts, but it would be as fake a fix as believing that though there were lots of fights between Argo and me, eventually she’ll see that there were also a lot of good things and those good things will carry the day. Because what I realized is that as much as I care about her, I don’t trust her as far as I can throw her, and I’m sure the feeling is mutual…. although I am sure she trusts me a lot more because I’m so much littler and therefore she can throw me a lot further. 😛

So I reached out to Scales, Pri-Diddy reached out to me, and I’m looking forward to seeing Nate and Emily again as well. My sister is coming to visit on the 29th, and she arranged a free day so that we could actually spend some time together outside of all her meetings. I want off this roller-coaster of emotion, and I’m trying. I’m looking for another therapist since Vesta does not take my insurance. I created a profile on Match.com (one of the free ones… I’m not ready to talk to anyone… just baby steps into the future as opposed to giant steps). It really got to me that Scales could see that I wasn’t ready for the future. She wanted to date me, and almost said so, but for whatever reason, decided not to… and I believe that it was because I was still so interested in processing the past rather than moving into my future….. of which I am quite tired, and yet caught in, because my personality type is just that. Figuring out the future by analyzing past mistakes, and not knowing when to stop. It doesn’t help that I’m an anxious person on top of all this INFJ, but even if I wasn’t saddled with mental health issues, I’d still be me.

Bipolar II

Rule No. 1: Learn to tell the difference. I am not Sally Field from ER, nor am I Ted Turner. Sometimes I feel good and productive. Sometimes I want to crawl in a hole. I take lamotrigine (brand name Lamictal™) to make sure my lows don’t go too low. My highs are limited to being awake for a long time. That’s it. I got nothin.’ In the bipolar spectrum, I mostly just need depression medication to leave the house. Because of this, I also take escitalopram (brand name Lexapro™), which is just a basic depression drug that’s been used since, I think (and you’ll have to check me on this), George Washington was a boy. Again, keeping my lows from going too low.

Anxiety

I care about everyone and everything in the room and am powerless to fix any of it, but I will take on as much as I can until I can’t breathe. Being in crowds is physically taxing because there’s no way to escape the noise of other people’s problems. For this, I take clonazepam (brand name Klonopin™). I used to only take benzos as needed during a panic attack, but a low dose every day seems to work much better…. mostly because I’m not already in the middle of a panic attack and THEN taking something for it. Ounce of prevention, pound of cure, etc. Benzos are known for high addiction rates, but the dose I’m on is so low that I don’t even notice much of a difference when I don’t take it, so there’s no reason for me to exhibit the drug-seeking behavior of someone who’s been without it.

I also used to take gabapentin (Brand name Neurontin™), but when I left Vesta I didn’t have any refills and I didn’t think it did anything. Maybe for you, it works. For me, it says “does not work” right on the bottle.

ADD/Trauma

I lump these together because at this point, I’m not sure which is which. Most of the symptoms I face are also on a trauma checklist… it’s hard to pay attention to the future when the tapes of your past are so ever-present in your mind… and yet, I still work in piles, I’m still habitually late when I overload myself with appointments, and ADD medication works on me. It doesn’t make me happy that it works, because I lose all appetite and start looking like a ten year old, but it does work. I was not diagnosed with ADD as a child, and I think I would have done much better in school if I had. I certainly kicked some ass in college…. but to be fair, college is built for ADD. There’s no daily homework. You just show up and take a test every few weeks. Remembering to turn in homework every day (even if it was completely finished and at home) ate my lunch.

In terms of crazy meds for ADD, I’ve tried them all- Ritalin, Ritalin XR, Adderall, Concerta- except Stratera. No, wait. I tried it for a week. Every time I’ve been on a norepinephrine booster that wasn’t a methamphetimine made me jittery, nauseous, forgetful, and forgetful. The best analogy that I can come up with for the difference between Adderrall and Stratera is that Adderall is pure cane sugar, and Stratera is Splenda. They both do the same thing, but in different ways… therefore, everyone’s reaction to them is going to be different. For some people, Splenda is a wonderful thing, but I need real sugar.

Or, at least I did. Now I manage my ADD by making sure that I sleep a lot and am therefore very conscious and alert all day…. especially with a borderline case like mine, I don’t have to medicate it unless I want to… and I don’t. I’m done with having no appetite and I’m done with people knowing I take it and offering to pay me for it and not taking no for an answer until it is very clear that I am going to lose my mind if you ask me one more time.

I’m laying it all out here because as you can see, none of the problems that I’ve got mentally are ever going to stop me from being my personality type. I am still the overthinker, but perhaps my mind would be occupied with much larger things than it is now. Mental health is a lot to manage, especially when people think you’re lazy and you’re actually struggling to keep your head above water… and anxiety triples the negative perceptions other people have about you, and I truly believe that the normal, non-depressed person does not have a frame of reference for it…. which is where the lazy and the “snap out of it” comes from.

I’ve also always been a dreamer, looking out the window, but unable to see the future… just turning the past over and over in my mind…. starting in about 7th grade. In sixth grade, I wanted to be a professional trumpet player, and I could see myself on The Tonight Show Bandstand as clearly as I see the iPhone in front of me. And then I met a narcissistic sociopath and I couldn’t dream into the future anymore, only about how to rework the past, because it had to be solved somehow. That’s where the psychotherapy comes in. There’s nothing that was done in my past to create a chemical imbalance, but knowing the difference between healthy and unhealthy reactions is exactly where the rubber meets the road.

I don’t want to live this life anymore. I want a different one. Nothing means more to me than my mental health, because my dreams are too big to sit dormant forever. Ministry is a second career for a lot of women, and I am at least learning to dream that far. I’m going to wear it like I “stole” it. Nerd with a Journal doesn’t have to mean Boo Radley, but no one is going to do this work for me, and that’s the hardest part of all. Can’t I just hire someone and they’ll let me know when my brain is ready?

 

 

 

As you know, I don’t drink enough to actually mean sober living in the AA sense, but in the Marcia sense, who told me that sober is actually an acronym… Son of a bitch, everything’s real. Actually, my funniest Marcia story is that we were sitting in Swirl (yogurt place in PDX), and she was telling me that she counsels people who’ve just gotten sober in terms of finding work. When she asked a man about his previous experience, he said that he drank a fifth every day for 20 years. I told her that if I’d been in her place, I would have leaned really close and said, “do you get dental with that?”

Ok, one more funny Marcia story. I was telling her that I thought the Mormon religion was interesting because it was one of the few started late enough that there is actual documentation all the way back to the beginning. Without missing a beat, she said, “no, we have documentation all the way back to when Joseph Smith made it up.” Sorry if you’re offended, but I’ve met too many Mormons over my lifetime that when they become actualized, there’s a point in Mormonism where they just look at themselves and say, “well, that got weird.”

But back to the whole sober living thing. I think that Dana and I partied too much and pondered too little. So when I moved in with the Nassers, who keep alcohol in the house but don’t drink it, I became the same way. My mental state became clearer just from not being one of those people who has a drink every night after work… and damnit if Marcia wasn’t right. Feelings became more intense the less I numbed out, which is probably why adding anxiety medication to my protocol was the right move. I didn’t realize how socially anxious I’d become until I gave away the small amount of social lubricant I allowed myself. Even when I went to the Women in Their 30’s Meetup and drinks were two for one, I gave my extra coupon to someone else… which made running into the glass door at the end of the night even more embarrassing because I didn’t have anything to blame except my own clumsiness. That night gave me more sympathy for Argo than I’ve ever had in my life, because all of the sudden it clicked in my head what it was like to get unwanted attention. I mean, it was fun to be flirted with, but when someone actually gave me their number and wanted me to call, I ran like a house on fire.

My best scenario for that evening was just to have some fun. In reality, it was a meat market and I was FRESH.

That’s the thing about the lesbian community. It’s so small that even in large cities, chances are you’re dating someone that’s already dated three or four of your friends and you just have to be okay with it, because what choice do you have?

Just having moved here was appealing to many of the women there, and I am not kidding when I say that a few threw themselves at me, which is why I was so lost in thinking about what a dumbass I was to Argo… and to one other woman that shall remain nameless but I thought was so cute I walked into a door trying not to notice.

It did not go well, except for with Dana, because she was laughing her ass off. In that moment, we were both 15-year-old boys, in a sense, egging each other on.

I thought that since she was happily married and so was I that she’d know I didn’t mean any harm. She did not. But I will excerpt part of a letter I wrote to Argo about her here, because it illustrates my true feelings about her:

If ___ were actually a lesbian, I wouldn’t hesitate to call her a butch. But because she’s not, it makes me root for her even more, because the world has to know there is more than one kind of straight woman.

I meant every word, and I will add that the world also needs to know that there are men out there who can handle the swagger, and like it. There’s all this bullshit written about how straight men cannot handle strong/smart women, and won’t. I find the opposite. Every strong straight woman I know has met a man that not only loved the strong and the smart, but encouraged it.

It generally goes something like this, “I’m a handful, and he’s capable.”

I would give damn near anything to hear someone say that about me… that I’m a handful, but they’re capable of getting it handled. I had that with Dana until I got really sick, really fast, and it was not something I could help. My entire world had just gone to hell in a handbasket, even with the move to Houston, because I was proud of myself for going back to my family and tightening the fortress, and at the same time, miserable because I couldn’t escape any of the memories I had there. It was the wrong decision entirely, as evidenced by the slow death and dismemberment of my marriage from the moment Dana and I moved there. To be sure, I had no idea it was coming. I thought everything was going to be fine, because I always think everything is going to be fine.

Instead, we hung out at the local ice house, we invited the neighbors over for drinks, we painted our dining room with chalkboard paint so we could play darts in the house, we did everything we could to escape. And as all of that was happening, my mental state got worse and worse, until I couldn’t ask anyone for help. I needed to get it on my own… to admit to myself that I was too much for my friends and family to help and needed professionals to take over their jobs…. which they did, masterfully so.

Getting out of Teas and into Maryland while jobless was what I needed at the time, because I qualified for Medicaid and Maryland had a wealth of services that Texas did not. As I have mentioned before, all of my appointments, BOTH psychiatry and psychology, were free, and my medication was $1.00/bottle. I didn’t like not having a job, because it felt like not having a purpose… but at the same time, I don’t think I would have progressed nearly so fast if I’d had to work all of my appointments around my schedule. I just wrote and wrote, hoping Oprah would call (if she did, I wasn’t home).

My anxiety went down to a manageable level, except where Argo was concerned, because I didn’t know what was going to happen between us and I was hoping for a miracle… not that she would all of the sudden realize she was in love with me, because #nevergonnahappen, but that peace and love would win out over enmity and fear. It was funny, I knew that it was never going to happen, anyway, but it was a paradigm shift when I realized I didn’t want to be with her… that I had to know whether Dana was right or wrong when she said that Argo would end up falling for me, anyway, just based on words… and at the same time realizing that as friends, all we’d done was fuck each other up and I didn’t want that to get any worse. If we could fight like cats and dogs as friends, what would it look like to have that day in and day out? It looked like an unholy mess, that’s what.

And in a very real sense, it seemed silly not to send her gifts on things like birthdays and Christmas, because I thought we were getting better AND I considered it back payment on services already rendered. 🙂  She’d been incredibly sweet and supportive of my writing, so I wanted to be incredibly sweet and supportive of her as a person in general. I’m glad I got that chance, no matter where we stand now. It made me feel good to give of myself, with no expectation of anything, just the spirit of giving.

Where I got tangled up in reciprocity was “things have been going so well… why do we keep fighting like this?” It had become an entrenched pattern that we couldn’t break, because every time her language escalated, I took it as a personal challenge. “I will not let you be bigger than me this time. I will not let you railroad me this time. I will not let you step on my head this time, etc.” That entrenched pattern was something I had with her that I don’t have anywhere else in my life. There was nothing I was ever going to do in which we’d be on equal footing, and she’d make sure I was powerless until we were both dead (although she will die first, because she is SO MUCH OLDER :P~).

I’m not eager to keep that pattern going, because it doesn’t get me anywhere except into “more trouble.” In quotation marks because in a way, her power position makes me feel parented instead of accepted for who I am…. and I’ve never had to feel that way before. I can’t take back any of my power with her, because she’s determined not to let it happen. Sometimes I feel as if I should just shake myself and say, “I wrote a book for you…. Chapter One…. Get over it. Chapter Two…. get over it…. Chapter Three…. get over it.”

If you could look into my mind and into my inbox, you’d know why this is so hard. But you can’t, so just bear with me. One day it will just click, and I’ll read my own book, and I’ll take Kristie’s advice just to stop caring. But there’s just so much there there….. you know?

Son of a bitch. Everything’s real.

There was something wrong with my entry this morning before I left work, something I couldn’t even put my finger on, but now it’s lunch and I’ve had some time to think about it and I know what it is. I called out Argo on her sunshine and chill, but I didn’t call out myself, and that’s even more important. Because this blog is about me and the things that happen to me out in the world, but it is also an internal monologue designed to keep me thinking about how to move forward in the world. From the very beginning, it was shit like #myhero #teamargo, and then due to a whole bunch of factors, I pushed her away *first.* The first time was when I realized that I had feelings for her that went beyond normal friend shit, because when people have opened up to me in the past, I just want to fix everything. Make everything all better. I know exactly why that crossed my Eros wire, but it is too personal to talk about here and had nothing to do with the few bones she threw me in the way of flirting. That was just funny, and all it would ever be. It felt good to feel cute in her “presence,” but the real issue was much, much, much, much deeper. I cut off all contact, which she told me she never thought I’d do in a million years over e-mail, that I’d tossed a friendship away like it was nothing, and my only response to that was, “is this the kind of energy you want coming at you all the time? Maybe I should have asked that question.” Because, here, in order, are the things I did after I ended that relationship (the first time, anyway):

• write about it
• cry about it
• regret it
• feel ok about it
• write about it again
• cry about it again and wish I had more Kleenex
• create a Spotify playlist called “Argo” and have it play continuously in my head.
• Smile to myself that she’d probably hate it.
• write about it again

I needed to let go of a piece of me that was diving into waters in which the relationship couldn’t stabilize, and I thought it was better for me to be in the storm alone. I didn’t toss anything like it was nothing. Then, she and Dana did some processing and a few days later, we were back in contact because I couldn’t decide what my better judgment was. In some ways, we needed each other. In others, I know for damn sure that any heart she’s ever broken still isn’t over it. She’s just the sort of person that when her light shines on you, it is like there’s no one else in the room.

The compromise was that I would stop talking about those feelings if she’d just allow me to flirt with her in a non-threatening way. That lasted 40 minutes, because she stepped over my comfort zone and any work I’d done to be able to let go of those feelings returned tenfold. But I didn’t tell her that part until much, much later. I will say for the record that to her, it probably was an innocent flirt. But it was too much to handle for me- I could dish it, but I couldn’t take it, and I feel stupid now that I didn’t think of that when I said I wanted to flirt with her in the first place, because her wordplay is so sharp that what did I think was going to happen? That she was going to sit still while I had my fun? I don’t think my feet touched the ground for three days. What I meant was “let me flirt with you, but for the love of God don’t flirt with me.” Totally double-standard and shitty, but probably the reason I didn’t think it would be an issue is that I didn’t think flirting with me would ever occur to her. #dumbassattack

So my hot and cold came from those feelings, because I alternated between wanting her close and not being able to handle it.

I can, now, but this is after YEARS of sitting with it. It helps that she’s ghosted, because I don’t have to worry one way or the other whether there is sunshine or chill on either of our parts…. and because I’ve pushed her away so many times that I had time to think on my own without going to her for comfort. You can’t get over someone and keep looking back across the river to make sure they’re ok. I see her quite differently now, and for that, I am grateful… even if the reason why is a healthy amount of fear.

Why wouldn’t I fear someone who consistently saw the worst in me? Why wouldn’t I fear someone who’s threatened me with a restraining order even though the most that’s ever happened between us is lobbing shitty e-mails at each other and nothing else? I’d hoped that the message was clear. I want as much to do with you as you want to do with me, and the things she views as harassment were (I thought) ways to get her to retreat, not get any closer. If she wants to take all of my shitty e-mails to a judge and claim that I threatened her, I could do the same. We were angry at each other, with no way to bridge the gap, so we just upped the ante until I went all in and she came in Kings full over Aces because she was hiding one up her sleeve.

But the thing is, I wouldn’t. I promised that I would keep all of her confidences, and I have, except for the ones where I thought Dana was permitted to be in on them. She told me that she was going to pull back on telling me things I couldn’t share with Dana, and then got mad at me that Dana knew some things she’d said after that.

It was things like that which kept my tail between my legs, because of course I felt horrible for processing with Dana even though I could only plead ignorance. Pleasing both of us was a moving target, and neither of us felt like we could win with the other. But the thing is, I am not as hard to please as she imagines. I would have been happy with my e-mails being seen as an entire narrative, and not just bad or good. I would have been pleased for Argo not to pick out one line she disagreed with and just hammer me on it as opposed to taking my letters for everything they were. I would have been over the moon if Argo had remembered that I was trying to be kind to her when she cut off our shoots of green. It wasn’t that long ago that I sent her a tongue-in-cheek gift in which she said it was the first time she’d laughed since last week. It wasn’t that long ago that I’d sent her a present which she proclaimed divine. But none of that mattered. Not any of it. Nothing mattered except that something I’d done bothered the shit out of her, and instead of being willing to talk about it, she just said, “I’m done.” There was no compromise, there was no benefit of the doubt, there was no anything except the insistence she was right and I was wrong. Period. The End. She said something to the effect that just because I didn’t hear what I wanted to hear, that didn’t mean she was wrong. I didn’t want her to tell me what I wanted to hear. I wanted her to take both points of view into consideration, just as I had. I could acknowledge the “you bothered the shit out of me” part, but I could not get behind it being intentional, because it just wasn’t true.

Thoughtless, certainly, but not trying to cause harm or unrest or any of those things. I am tired of screaming into the void that I don’t want to bother her, and I’m sorry for anything I’ve ever done along those lines. I’m sorry for every second I was unkind. I am sorry for every moment I pulled away when she needed me more, not less, even though I needed it for self-care. I’m sorry for every moment she’s said she regretted ever letting me into her life, because her truth is so far from reality. When she told me I needed to get a grip on reality, I told her I thought I had a really good one given all the shit that’s gone down, and I think it’s the only thing I’ve said that really rang true to me. Despite all of this, I am still just me, trying to live my life in the unenviable position of the over-thinker.

I blame myself for everything, just everything, even though I’ve been assured it’s not all my fault. But that doesn’t help when I’m trying to fall asleep… which is why I take sleeping medication that knocks me out so I don’t dream, and I take it as soon as I get home from work so that the day ends and begins early.

My biggest regret is that kindness didn’t win.

But you can’t win them all. Sometimes you just get up from the table.

Today I woke up with my mind stayed on Jesus, an old hymn that runs through my head when I make the decision to be happy. Yesterday, I made the decision to feel grief, really feel it in hopes that it wouldn’t come back up and bite me in the ass later. I find that it is more advantageous to deal with grief as it comes, and just to let it. But today I realized more than ever that there is nothing I can do, and it’s just time to move on and be as reasonably happy as I can despite everything that’s gone down over the last three years. You can’t tell someone tha they’re a snake in the grass (no matter how true it might be) and expect that things will go back to normal… even though that is nowhere near anything as bad as the things Argo and I have said to each other in private and those things have rolled off as we tried to navigate what it would look like to be the type of friends that check in with each other.

For whatever reason, Argo is determined to be scared of me, even though there is nothing I could do that would rival anything she’s willing to do to me. To make me feel smaller and more afraid than I’ve ever been in my life. To send across escalated words that are designed to hurt and think that I’ll just lie down and take it. I generally don’t start fights so much as finish them, because generally what has happened is that a perceived threat comes across and not a real one. And then Argo takes all her shitty feelings towards me and throws them back in my face. She waffles between never having done so, and taking responsibility for the fact that she is also capable of creating negativity and shares much of the blame in what’s gone on. I don’t know what to believe, because while I can hold cognitive dissonance in my head for years at a time, I’d rather have it solved sooner than later.

Sooner has come, and apparently that means nothing. No check-ins, no “I’m sorrys,” no anything. And I will have to live with that, but it doesn’t mean that I have to be sad about it all the time. It is a letting go that probably needed to happen long ago, and yet we just kept trying… and yet, not. The best thing that she’s ever said to me was when I sent her a cool present, and she told me to stop sending her gifts because the best present I could have given her was getting well. It meant more than diamonds, but of course, it didn’t last long.

I told her that being in her life took an incredible toll on my marriage, but an even bigger toll on me because in the end, I couldn’t make room for myself anymore, either. I just worried about all her stuff like a mother hen, and ignored all the things I needed to do to take care of myself.

Three years ago, she told Dana and me that we should move to DC because with our smarts, we’d be imminently hireable… and “too smart for my own good” may have escaped her lips more than once. Those words stuck with me, and as it happened, they turned out to be true. I have a job that equals my salary in Houston, and no wish to spend it. I have more money in my bank account than I’ve had in years- not enough for three months worth or living expenses, but very close to two, and not living paycheck to paycheck is worth so much more to me than anything I could have done for myself.

This is probably because when I go out to dinner with my friends, I don’t feel the need to pick up the entire check just to make sure they like me… because now, I am not driven by impressing anyone…. and in fact, probably part of the reason I haven’t really started dating yet, because with it comes money. You can’t even go to the movies anymore without dropping a buttload. Even the movies that are non-3D are over $14 a ticket. With 3D, it’s over 20. Now, I can’t see 3D movies because I have monocular vision, but that’s not going to stop me from going to see something that other people want to see.

The only movie in which anything has ever jumped out at me was at Epcot Center, where they had a Muppets movie made in what’s called 4D, and there were prisms in the glasses. That was when the HSPVA orchestra played Disney World, and the movie was the most memorable part, because for the first time, I could see what everyone else saw. Sweetums is bigger than advertised, and the Swedish Chef threw food on me. I haven’t seen a movie advertised in 4D since, but I’m still waiting……. The funniest line in the movie, to me, was Kermit walking through Bunsen and Beaker’s lab, saying that they’d invited all the world’s most famous scientists to see their discoveries, but they refused to come.

The other funny part of the trip is that we played a suite of tunes from West Side Story, not adapted for orchestra, but the real Lenny Bernstein score. The reason that’s funny is that everyone behaved themselves and said “mambo,” when in rehearsal, it was “dildo, “gringo,” etc. We had a million of ’em, and I’m sure that any other PVA’ers that read this web site can fill you in on the horrible things we said. 🙂 Most conductors wouldn’t have let us get away with it, but ours let it slide, not even threatening us with death if we did that during a performance.

So today I am concentrating on memories that make me laugh, and trying to be as happy as I can be as I was sad yesterday… leaving the questions in my mind alone as I wonder what would have happened if I’d made the break from Argo stick so that I could, in a sense, have my life back.

But my last fight with Dana pretty much solved all of that. She put her hands around my neck and started to squeeze, and when she let go, finally, I returned the favor and that’s when I realized how little I was and to just give up. Dana was standing there just saying, “do it.” And I was standing there thinking that my hands couldn’t wrap around her neck, anyway. It was the second-most time I’d ever felt more powerless, and thankful that all I got in that fight was some broken blood vessels in my face and not bruises around my neck, because her hands were twice the size of mine and plenty more powerful.

But the hardest part of that fight was not recovering from the physical bruise, but the insistence that I deserved it. That for all of the emotional pain I’d inflicted on her, it gave her every right to come at me physically. The first most scared I’ve ever been is when Argo’s weird shit-o-meter went off and I had no idea what would be waiting for me when I got here… I even thought that there would be police waiting for me at DCA, unfounded and yet very real in my mind. It was by the grace of God that Argo realized that she was responsible for negativity in our relationship as well, and it wasn’t fair to lay all of it in my lap. In trying to push her away, I frightened her as well as she frightened me, and if there is anything I wish I could take back, it is that… on both sides of the equation.

It would kill her for me to say this, but I’m going to say it anyway, that our relationship had all the hallmarks of the same fucked up relationship I had with Diane… the sunshine so bright I couldn’t see, and the eventual discard. But by that time, I was aware of it… I just couldn’t erase our chord as fast and as easily as she could. Sunshine and chill were a part of our lives in equal measure, because sometimes escalated language came across to her in e-mails that were never meant to be attacks, they were just taken that way. I just never learned to diffuse the bombs, or if I did, they were taken as “not the real me.”

I had to learn to see myself in a whole different light, without her influence at all, because when I didn’t, I didn’t deserve to live life to the fullest. I was beaten down in just about every possible way one could be beaten, physically, mentally, emotionally, ecumenically, grammatically…….

Getting involved in my church’s youth group was the first time I was able to see myself as the lovable geek I’ve always been, and the kids responded to me in a way that I never thought they would- opened up the channels for more love, more support, more everything than I could possibly imagine.

So I choose to be happy, because I have those memories as well. I cannot even, so I won’t.

I learned from the “Memories” section on Facebook today that the blog post I published that introduced me to Argo was three years ago today. As you can imagine, a stone has dropped to the pit of my stomach and I’m kind of sweating out the grief. I made the fatal mistake of e-mailing her about it, but not fatal because she wrote anything back. Fatal because of the promises I’d made to myself… it let me down that I couldn’t keep them. She’s told me that I’d never hear from her directly again, and I’m ok with that. What I’m not okay with is being untrue to myself. I wanted this detente to last, to stop the fighting between two unhappy countries, and I haven’t done anything except make myself a sad sack’s worth of memories.

But I did tell her that to me, she was perfect despite all her flaws, failures, and vulnerabilities, and anything that happened after that was irrelevant. Those words may not resonate with her, but it made me feel good to say them. And perhaps that is why I needed to write- to ease the pain inside myself, rather than the pain inside her. There is nothing I can do about that, because her reactions are her reactions and I take nothing away from them. There’s also a chance that she’s not getting my e-mails at all, and that kind of makes me feel even better, because knowing I can write into the void of space and time without knowing whether I’m being heard or not is better than anything she’d probably write back. Although there was a time when she told me that she’d blocked my e-mails, and after writing to her regardless because I knew it was just going into the void of interspace, I realized she was indeed getting everything. Just everything.

However, I am lucky that I did not say anything in those e-mails that would have mattered one way or the other. I just talked. One was a 20-minute voice message in which she never said anything about, but was mortifying knowing she got it in the first place. Again, it was nothing. Just talking into space because I thought that if she could *hear* me, really hear me, it would be different than just seeing me in black and white. What I learned from that escapade is not to count on the fact that she tells me my e-mails are blocked. 🙂

Holidays are hard, extremely so, because those are the moments I remember back to the people we used to be to each other and wishing there was some sort of reset button in which we get to start over at flipping each other shit and leaving it at that…. or at the very least, a chance to give each other our hearts and mean it in the sweet and light it was meant to be. The kind where Dana wouldn’t have had to be threatened. The kind where I wouldn’t have had to be threatened. The kind that would have sewn our fabric with a double stitch instead of ripping it apart.

And then I think, “who am I kidding? Dana would have been threatened no matter what I did, because she didn’t like me having friends outside of her.” We could have joint friends, but individual friends just wouldn’t have happened on her watch. Her jealousy knew no bounds, because, well, I can’t tell you why, but it just was.

I could have Dana or I could have Argo, and I made my choice. It was the difference between “you’ll never amount to anything” and “I don’t believe in God, but I do believe in you.” Given those two statements, I doubt anyone would have made a different choice. It didn’t matter that Dana was my partner and Argo was my friend. I could do without being married if my wife was going to treat me like shit.

My friends are my lifeblood, and are saving me one day at a time as I navigate learning to live again. What I never counted on was Argo’s “oh-shitometer” going up as high as it did, because moving to DC only had as much to do with her as she wanted it to be, to cultivate real friendship instead of just knowing each other in the space we’d created over long e-mail exchanges. By that time, she wanted no part of it, and I respected her wishes.

Eventually we made up, but not to the point where we were comfortable enough to meet on the ground. Just enough that seeing each other’s names in our inboxes didn’t incite fear. Because the truth of the matter is that we were both afraid of each other in our own ways, not sure how to navigate being geographically close (but not incredibly so), and how I tried to meet her fear with braggadocio that covered up a million insecurities because I didn’t want to be in a small place of fear. I wanted to stand up to her, because the more she harped on me, the worse I felt…. and yet, there was nothing I could do to be equal. By God, she was going to be bigger and stronger than me no matter what I did or said, and the more she impressed upon me just how big and strong she could be, the more I folded into myself, unable to get light in my eyes again because I was again trying to take up as little space in the world as I could. I sat in my room and prepared to get owned.

For the first couple of months that I was here, I didn’t even leave my house unless I had to go to the grocery store or to the pharmacy. Occasionally, I’d let myself have a trip into DC, but they were short-lived due to enormous anxiety. Anything and everything I said was filed away as just another reason why she needed to be scared of me…. and had she looked at me, really seen into my eyes instead of into my letters, she wouldn’t have been scared of me at all.

Instead, we’d have a close moment, and then fight our guts out, and the close moments got ignored in favor of every fight escalating into cutting each other off at the knees. I got plenty tired of kneeling, but as a fixer/pleaser, it didn’t stop me from trying to erase all the fear and turn it into the goodwill I actually wanted for her…. but even being nice to her was fraught with being wrong. Even in trying to be kind, I felt small.

My other friends have rescued me from this fixer/pleaser attitude because clearly, it was only hurting me. I still hurt, every day, in fact, but the fact that the fights are gone are doing me a lot of good. I don’t feel so small. I am coming into the fullness of myself after having missed it for a long time. So much so that I realize writing to her is the biggest mistake I could have made, because it hurts so damn much that I couldn’t not. I couldn’t keep the most important promise I’ve made to myself in years.

Even if it was the anniversary of the day we met.

 

Scales is on Ocracoke Island this weekend, and her pictures are gorgeous enough to wish I’d thought of getting on Air BnB and going to the OBX as well. OBX is shorthand for the Outer Banks of North Carolina, and if the pictures are doing it justice, one of the most gorgeous places on earth. I would have picked a different location, only because Scales is with her family and all I would have wanted was to walk on the beach alone. I wouldn’t have wanted to crash her vacation, just saying that it would have been cool to create my own.

I forget that I have the power to do these things. You know, like book my own hotel rooms, drive to my own destinations, etc. Most of the time, I stay holed up in my room with books and movies because it wouldn’t occur to me to branch out… especially today. If I went into DC today, I would be mobbed with tourists from the train to anywhere I wanted to go, and if there’s anything I hate more than being alone, it’s being alone in a crowd so tight I can’t breathe.

I think that’s why so many people that live here go on vacation for Memorial Day. Having a “staycation” this weekend just sucks. It’s just hot enough to be uncomfortable and get sunburned even if you’re waiting to get inside a museum. There are beaches in Maryland, to, but if I really wanted to go, I should have thought of it yesterday. I don’t want to do two three-hour drives in one day…. because I think there are closer ones, but those are the ones that are going to be the most crowded with locals who hate tourists just as much as I do.

Sometimes I forget where I am.

NYC is less than four hours away. Boston, seven. And conceivably, you can drive to the White or Green mountains in one day if you leave early enough. Ottawa and Montreal are also not that far, but I’d rather save Montreal for when JazzFest is going on. Plus, I had a bad experience in Montreal, one that I’m not eager to repeat. The people at the gas stations were so fucking rude to me, but since I don’t have an American accent to really speak of, perhaps they thought I was a Canadian who couldn’t speak French, a much bigger sin than being an American in Canada. And besides, the only thing I really want to do in Canada besides JazzFest is go to a grocery store and load up on all the Canadian foods I love.

• Sugar Free Juicy Fruit.
• Grapefruit Trident.
• Ketchup chips.
• Mint Aero bars.
• Coffee Crisp.
• A trip to the beer store to get an Alexander Keith’s to drink while I’m sitting outside.
• A trip to an outdoor market that sells Beaver Tails, a pastry that we call an “Elephant Ear” here in the US, but taste inexplicably better.
• Going through the drive through at Tim Horton’s knowing they already have hot tea brewed that you can order with milk and sugar without having to wait for it to steep.

There are a few Tim Horton’s in the US, but I doubt they sell hot tea that way, because it is just not as popular here as it is in a British territory.

I also want to see the wilds of Nunavut, thanks to Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie, because “one fifth of my country…. is also Nunavut.” 🙂 The fact that I don’t know anything about Nunavut (or much else) has never stopped me before.

There’s so much I want to do that needs advance planning, and I am of the “not so much” variety when it comes to doing so. I get into the “it’s not worth the hassle” movement and slowly back out of plans. Just got a new book from Amazon. That’ll do, right?

I also downloaded S2, E1 of Outlander, and the first scene grabbed me. It was exactly as I’d pictured in my mind. I wish they’d stayed in the “present day” a little longer, because Claire and Frank’s interactions regarding their “starting over” marriage and the baby that would eventually become Bree was as close to the book as the movie that ran through my mind. I also realized that because of the scenes from the last season, I hadn’t watched all of Season 1. So perhaps I will spend my day flipping between Jamie and Frank, because the book that the second season is based on, Dragonfly in Amber, is probably my favorite of them all… although I will never forgive the cunning stunt that spoiled Claire’s pregnancy for me in an Amazon review.

And on that note, I will continue to look at Scales’ pictures with no small amount of jealousy and read in the sunlight on my beloved porch…. a staycation without tourists.

My favorite.

I wrote a blog for the first 3 months I was in Iraq (I called it 48 Mondays due to the amount of time I would be deployed) It was cathartic and exactly what I needed. I stopped writing just after Christmas as I used so much emotional energy just to get through the Holidays that I didn’t really have it in me to keep it up. I regret that. I should have written about the pain, the sorrow and the seemingly bottomless pit of despair I felt realizing that I still had 9 months to go.

I got this from my “Memories” section on Facebook, and I was too busy flirting with all my newfound readers to really pay attention to it (It was the day my marriage article EXPLODED). When I saw it again today, I was struck by the reality of Memorial Day in a whole new way. This soldier didn’t die, so by the grace of God it is not her Memorial Day, but I happen to know that she’s deployed again and I don’t know how many Mondays are left this time, but I am struck with all the waiting.

• Waiting to know if she’s coming home safely.
• Wondering if she’s in danger, and if so, how much?
• Waffling between whether I’d want to know.
• Knowing she couldn’t/wouldn’t tell me, anyway… Partly because of confidentiality in the military, and partly because I made a huge mistake that ended our friendship permanently, but it doesn’t stop the worry altogether. There will never be a time in my life when I don’t know her, and she doesn’t know me.

Struck by how real and vulnerable she was in typing that on my Facebook page in the first place, and regretting that I didn’t answer it quickly, because this is as real as it gets… as it will ever get in terms of seeing into the mind of someone who knows the pain of being overseas in a place where her family is safe at home and she’s stuck in some shithole in the Middle East while life goes on without her. Another re-integration. Another putting down of the luggage and hopefully the memories they contain, because I would imagine that it’s not the deployment itself that’s the problem. It’s everything that goes with the deployment.

I’d like to imagine that her rank makes her safe in a SCIF somewhere, in the planning and execution rather than on the front lines, but that is just a guess to make me feel better, when the reality might be quite different. But we as supporters of soldiers make all kinds of shit up in our heads to try and make ourselves feel better. You know, so we can sit here and have hot dogs on our day off because soldiers give us that right.

The truth is that what we see are the illusions of news, and not the reality of being the boots on the ground. It is more that we can imagine, more than we can reasonably wrap our brains around, more than we can process at any given time… which is why there’s a reason that the reality isn’t shown. It’s terrifying, viscerally so.

Although if you’re really interested, don’t watch American news. Watch the BBC or Al Jazeera. It will scare the bejesus out of you, but it is more than the American media are willing to part with as not to panic the American people. The American media “protects us.” But it is to our  detriment. In order to celebrate Memorial Day, we need to focus on what really matters. Disarming IEDs in the middle of the road. Snipers on both sides of the equation and soldiers caught in the crossfire.  And here I sit, drinking a cherry Diet Dr Pepper, staring at the screen while our soldiers give me the right to just sit here without worrying what’s going to happen to me, but it doesn’t do jack or shit to stop me from worrying about what’s going to happen to them.

The best I can hope for is that intelligence on the ground from friendlies will give us enough information to stop attacks before they happen… their own Claire Fraser (Outlander series) who knew which way the British were coming for the Scottish. Because of time travel, she wasn’t a spy. She’d read what happened in a lot of the battles and when she fell through the stones in Scotland and ended up 200 years and some change from the present day, passed on the little she knew from history books. But it is not the same. How do you know if you’ve really turned someone into a friendly? How do you know that the information they’re passing is correct? How do you know that they are helping you prevent an attack instead of leading you into the middle of the fire?

You don’t.

You just hope you got the right information at the right time, and that it’s actually usable. Otherwise, you could end up kicking in doors and instead of finding the right HVT, it’s just a woman armed to the teeth with explosives, ready to blow up three city blocks without even thinking about it.

And this is where my mind goes as we “celebrate” Memorial Day.

Good luck and godspeed  to all of their Mondays, and the Mondays after that.

Amen.

 

I actually can not get enough of the mirror. Please never stop. Help me see all of myself, especially the hideous, shitty parts that I have kept hidden from me for so long I didn’t even know they were there.

Sure it’s scary, the truth is scary, and once you know, you can’t un-know, but that’s the point. Why the hell else are we here: to be inadvertantly fucked up by the people who have the best intentions (our parents), take our experience based belief system into the world and continue the cycle…until we realize there’s a cycle, and then decide which parts of it work for us and which ones are garbage. There’s no way to do that without getting down and dirty in our own minds, by listening to the people we trust when they shine light on the dirt.

We just have to be sure it’s our decision to vacuum that shit up, or leave it there and be proud of it. Flitting between those decisions can only happen once we know it’s there.

Thank you for helping to shine the light on my dirt Leslie. XOXO

Bryn

I truly believe that this is the finest comment I’ve ever gotten from anyone, anywhere, I am quite biased because Bryn has been one of my best friends since Jesus was a boy, but at the same time, she shoots straight. So it isn’t all bias. As she would say, “it’s just true.” But I will say that based on our past conversations, I don’t write about Bryn’s dirt specifically. We are on this journey together, and when she sees herself in me, she takes it in like, “why are you in my brain?”

We have similar stories in terms of letting our emotions be controlled by how other people are feeling and trying to fix something that really can’t be fixed. She’s a lot further along in her journey than I am in mine, despite being a lot younger. That’s because she’s taken more steps to get away from the people who controlled her emotions than I have. I need her strength, especially right now, because it sustains me as I walk my own path toward the freedom of being self-directed. I find that I am fine on my own, but the minute I give my heart to someone else, I don’t depart from the dysfunction I’ve always known. Perhaps that means I am better off as a single person, because when I am partnered, I become the fixer/pleaser that eventually no one likes because they can’t make a decision to save their lives…. because they want to do what you want to do.

I dated Bryn’s brother for a short period of time, and we were both fixer/pleasers, and neither one of us wanted to disappoint the other, so our relationship never went anywhere. I saw this Tweet about marriage that made me think of him and our relationship, that marriage is “just a series of asking each other what you want for dinner until one of us dies.” Dana and I had a little bit of that, but at the same time, I always thought she was in charge because I was only allowed to be right so much of the time, and when I was, I made sure that it was duly noted because it happened so rarely. 🙂

I completely decompensated in that relationship because of it. When I cleaned something, Dana would come along behind me and do it “right.” Just an example, but a huge one as I felt more and more devalued. I went into my small place and couldn’t get out, which is why the lifeline to Argo was so important to me. There was someone in my life who thought that I was capable of more than, well, that.

By the end of our relationship, I thought I was a complete failure and Dana wondered why I’d stopped taking care of myself. Because when I don’t feel valued, I don’t take care of myself. Period. I try to take up as little space in the world as I possibly can. It was nice having someone do all my laundry and fold everything with military precision, but each little thing she took over because she thought I wasn’t doing a good enough job took a piece of my soul with it…. to the point where she came over after we’d broken up and looked at my kitchen and started tidying and I said, “no, this is my kitchen now. Get out.” For a cook, a kitchen is the same space as a sanctuary. There might as well be a cross on the wall. To Dana’s credit, being a chef in her own right, understood and immediately retreated.

We were both very different personalities that somehow made it work for a lot of years, but at heart, our years of communication styles were set in stone by our parents. For Dana, it was “wait until a little thing drops the Mento over the Diet Coke and explode about everything I’d ever done wrong all in the same fight.” For me, it was “get angry in the moment, and then it’s over and we don’t have to revisit it.” She felt like I was picking on her all the time. I felt like she was intentionally keeping things from me because she didn’t want me to get angry. But at the same time, I understood why. We fought differently, and always would. It felt like not being able to be the full emotional range of a human being, because if Dana was angry about something and didn’t bring it up, I couldn’t express anger and then the fight would be over and problem solved.

There was only one time that she got mad at me in the moment, and it was a doozy. I’d gotten a lot of parking tickets in PDX and it was going to wipe out our emergency fund to pay them. She yelled at me on the street in front of God and everybody, and instead of being embarrassed, I almost cried with joy. We were going to have this fight right here, right now, and then it would be over. She wasn’t going to save it up for later. Of course I was just as frustrated with myself for being such a right jackass, so it was a mixture of emotion. Shame and pride coursing through my body because eventually, Dana would cease to be mad and we could get shit handled. She finally got angry at me in a way that I desperately appreciated, and I told her so. She was utterly baffled at first when she finished screaming and I said, “I’M SO PROUD OF YOU!!!!!”

So, a few years later, when her car got towed and impounded for something or other, I didn’t even flinch. It was like, “I ain’t even mad.” Dana handled my issue with such grace that getting mad at her seemed unnecessary given the amount of shame she was putting on herself for it. We just got shit handled.

It was the same with her DUI. We’d been through so much together that this was just one more thing to add to the list of situations in which we needed to lean on each other to survive. She was embarrassed enough as is; I didn’t need to add anything on top of it. Even driving her to work at 2:30 in the morning became a ritual that has stayed with me all these years as something sacred. Driving through the night when all was quiet.

I don’t remember the exact moment that we turned against each other instead of taking care of each other, but I can think of several moments that added up in my memory. But the ultimate reason for us to be apart is that Dana and I would always fight differently, and there was no way around it. Our communication styles were too different, too entrenched, to go the long haul. But that doesn’t mean that I didn’t want to. Reality hit me like a brick wall.

I loved Argo’s brain because it worked more like mine- we’d get angry and yell at each other, and then it was over. This latest go ’round is, to me, for the best, but not a case, as she puts it, of being “creepy AF.” Curiosity killed the cat. I thought that if I came her way and recognized how it must have felt to her, that she’d recognize that I was just being me, processing grief in the best way I knew how. But there was no compromise, but I feel good that I made the effort, anyway.

And then there was just more escalated language and more “I’m done.”

And that came from me. She was putting a lot on me that just wasn’t there, never would be, and escalating a fight far beyond what it needed to be, as we have done, again, since Jesus was a boy. She finally pushed me one too many times and I got tired enough to fight for myself instead of for her.

I wrote her a letter once that she said that she hoped one day she’d have enough courage to respond. I hope for that, too, because for all of our flaws, failures, and vulnerabilities, I would like to think that there is a modicum of affection left. I don’t know if when she throws her escalated words around if she actually means them, or is just mad in the moment and doesn’t know what to do except launch RPGs designed to hurt and regret, just like I do.

I don’t want to fight anymore, even if our fighting styles are more similar to each other than not. I also don’t want to crawl back on my stomach the way I have pretty much every month for the last two years…. because I’m not getting argo. I’m getting Argo.™ And I’m afraid that there is nothing that will bring argo back, and she’s the one I love.

Argo™ is tough as nails with armor to match, and once it’s up, you’re late.

I tried to love barbed-wire Argo™ to the best of my ability, but friendship requires a modicum of reciprocity, and I got tired of there not being any. That I could come her way all I wanted but she wouldn’t give an inch. Everything to her came across as an attack. Nothing was ever a conversation-starter or a way to bridge the past into the future. Once I realized that, I was out.

But I’m not very far out, and that’s where Bryn comes in. I look at her for strength when I just want to cry to Argo and beg to have her in my life at whatever level she can engage…. to stop going back into dysfunction and keep delving into myself to try and find the pieces of me that allowed all my triggers to be pulled at once. To look hard into the past and find out how I got here from there.

I think all the time about what would have happened had Dana consistently made room and argo calmed down. I think back to all the things I could have done and didn’t.

And then Bryn reminds me that I cannot change the past, and it is so very useless. But I am one of those people who has to look at all 85 sides of a problem before I can put it down. Right now, I’m at about 16.

Sometimes I really hate that aspect of my personality type, but that’s what INFJ does. There is no self-improvement without a Freudian amount of delving into the past.

Penis.

I haven’t written for a while because my stomach has been torn up for days, mostly brought upon by finding a Jamaican joint near my work and not thinking the sauce was hot enough and putting scotch bonnet sauce on it as well. I seriously could not stop eating. It was a high better than drugs…. until I woke up at 1:30 in the morning and couldn’t go back to sleep, thus wrecking my schedule for the day. Luckily, I had to go to the grocery store to get all the stuff for an ice cream social that I planned for all the employees, so I wasn’t the one that was late. I was the one that brought ice cream…. and sanctioned late at that.

Last night Scales and I went to Cava, and that didn’t sit well with me, either, but I only woke up for a few minutes in the middle of the night and was able to get back to sleep, but slept in until 7:30. Since it’s only a 20 minute drive, I can conceivably sleep later than that, because it only takes me about 20 minutes to get ready in the morning. The problem comes in when I don’t know Duncan’s schedule and he starts the shower at the exact moment I was trying to beat him to it.

I try not to get to the office too early, because when I get here early (as I’ve been doing for ages), there’s no one to unlock the door and I end up running to CVS or 7-Eleven or Walgreens or whatever just to pass the time. The best time to get here is 5 after, because at least I know I’ll be able to carry all my stuff in one pass, rather than putting it on the porch and waiting for someone with a key. Maybe one day I’ll have enough seniority to have my own key so that I won’t have to go to Starbucks. I can actually work in my own office. #dreams

I also opened a huge can of worms with Scales at dinner last night, one that I didn’t mean to. I am just on the “think it, say it” plan most of the time and she was showing me a picture of her current squeeze and I said, “it’s not beyond me that she looks a lot like me.” Why. Just why. I felt like a raging jackass because even though it was true, it was a can of worms that I didn’t know what quite so tall.

I’m still getting over all of the grief of my past life, and she’s moving in four months. I’m not interested in anything casual, and having done long distance relationships before, I am quite gunshy. Meag had a girlfriend in Canada while I was in Texas and moved in with her and they’d lived together for a month before she told me that she was breaking up with me. It stung, so long-distance relationship is a fucking dirty word to me. But to be fair, it wasn’t the first time Meag had ever kicked me around, and I got used to trying to please her all the time, hoping she’d cut that shit out. But she didn’t.

She’s told me since that she wishes she’d treated me better. I take that for all its enormous worth, but it didn’t help then.

And again, I do not know where I am in my grief cycle, because there are times when the only person I want in the world is Dana, and there are times when I feel we were just living in this Never Never Land and it was time to grow up. When I met Argo, I began to dream bigger and want to do more with my time and just try to concentrate on giving back to the world as much as she does.

And because I wanted out of the relationship with Dana, I’m getting to the point where I can speak about her in the past tense. With Argo, I talk about her all the time because I cannot wrap my brain around past tense with her. Surely there’s something I could have said, something I could have done, something I could have achieved that would make this all go away, as if our fights and impasses were all some sort of crazy nightmare that will end when I wake up, and yet, this is reality.

I screwed myself out of time with her on the ground, and the thing I wanted most in the world was to tell her thank you for real. To say thank you for saving my life, because she did it in more ways than one. Even seeing stupid things like her Twitter handle is enough to make me sniffle, so I blocked her from both @ldlanagan and @lesliecology because I know she’s smart enough to type in the URL of this web site and I prefer not knowing if she’s reading or not. I don’t write for her, just about her, because these are the things that trouble me. So much I wish I could have done differently; so much that I wish she’d done differently, because it made us both terrified of each other.

My then-friend Notorious’ first words to me were, “I thought you’d be taller.” It was a big hit around our house for months, but to me it articulates how utterly small and non-threatening I am. But the right words at the right time bite, and I used enough of them to make my online persona completely different from the person I am on the ground. I realize that mistake, and now I don’t talk to people on the Internet at all, except for Tinder, because it’s the easiest way to meet people quickly for real. People who tell me it’s a sex app make me laugh and say, “not when you only add doctors, lawyers, diplomats, and soldiers.”

One of these days, it will click, the enormity of the desruction that I’ve caused, and how it’s better for Argo and me to be apart so that we can’t continue to fight like first children. We both have the power to fuck each other up royally, and I think those things are better left alone, because all the fight is out of me and I would give anything to have my sweet small-a argo by my side.

Like last night. I wrote her a long, long letter in my head. I hope she read it, but I don’t know if my brain waves reach all the way to Alexandria yet. I’ll have to ask Nate. 🙂

But I just wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote and put it in our chord, because even if her end isn’t there, it becomes a loopback, feeding me. So what if I’m sending everything back through localhost (obscure joke, talk to your IT guy)? Did she really need to know what I was thinking for me to figure it out on my own? My thought process is that a real relationship with Scales would end in a huge mess because I wouldn’t have wanted to let her go…. and I also wasn’t ready to let go of that part of myself yet. Kisses like I really mean them, vulnerability enough to be naked in front of someone, and a libido that borders on non-existent. There are so many things I’m just not willing to let go of, and in order to have someone special in my life, I would have had to.

But then I started thinking about my enormous grief loop and wondering how over I needed it to be to move forward because nothing will ever be perfect. That I am limiting myself to my own head most of the time, and how healthy that may or may not be. Besides, Scales’ squeeze is a colonel in the Air Force. I’d pick her, too. Although I laughed my ass off when Scales told me that one of her Marine friends told her to tell said colonel, “Congratulations! That’s almost like being in the military!” Although, I can tell she’s tough shit if she works in a SCIF in the Pentagon. So beat that with a stick.

I also think that one of the reasons I’m so stuck on soldiers is the way they move in the world. They’re not afraid of anything because they don’t have to be. Anything they’ve seen is in no way comparable to the #firstworldproblem life we live here. Plus, there’s a part of me that feels so small inside that sometimes it would be nice to feel like I have my own protector, my own advocate. And then I get into the loop of “well, what if I spend my life attached to her pant leg because I think can’t make it on my own?” How much of it is rooted in the safety I’m trying to get away from?

For a time, my life was based on how Argo was feeling… and it came over time, not at the beginning, because originally she saw me as the brave one, the strong one…. and in true Leslie fashion, I incrementally pushed that relationship into the same dysfunction I’d always known because I never knew any different.

That’s the pitfall I want to avoid in my next relationship. I don’t need a parent or a child, but a partner. I’ve been in both of those relationships, and the power imbalance destroys everything. Just everything.

I didn’t want to make things weird with Scales, because I truly enjoy her friendship. It just fed my ego that this new squeeze looked like me, because she was the version of me I wish I was. I’ve said before that I wanted to be in the “Airmen of Note.” And there she was with her French Horn in one of the Air Force bands. Of course, being a trumpet player is far superior to being a French horn player, but I wouldn’t be a trumpet player if I didn’t say that.

It was something that came out of my mouth too fast, because there’s a solid reason I chose to be friends with Scales. She and I were both broken when we came into this friendship, and being friends has helped us to combat some of that. And I didn’t want eros and philia to cross wires, and so far, they haven’t. I don’t know what I would have done had Scales asked me out directly, but what I do know is that it’s better that she didn’t. I am a selfish jerk right now because I cannot afford to focus on anything except getting my own shit together. I didn’t want to put that aside for a new relationship dopamine rush.

Plus, it’s just not a good idea to break up with someone and not get tested for everything under the sun (I trust Dana to the ends of the earth, this is not about her) before you date someone else. I did it when I broke up with Kathleen, too, and even though everything came back clean it was the most I’ve ever sweated in a doctor’s office. Diane took me and I could tell she was jus as uncomfortable as I was, so I leaned up against her and just let the time pass. She usually got freaked out when I wanted that amount of affection, because affection is hers to give. But I didn’t care. I just took it.

Mostly like I’m taking all this time for myself, trying to figure out who I really am independently of what anyone else says about me… and the Truth being that what someone else thinks of me is none of my business.

I listened to an interview between Terri Gross and Marc Maron that made me cry as I was driving home yesterday. He said that in his personal life, the people who confide in him are tired of him confiding in others, like the people who listen to his podcast, because it’s that it’s only his voice out there… that they don’t have a way to answer. And then Terri says, “but we as your audience are also the people that want to be confided in.” Game. Over. Bawling on the freeway.

I liked Scales’ perspective that my writing didn’t have anything to do with our friendship, that it’s so different from our interactions in real life that it’s easy to compartmentalize as the other side of me, and not necessarily the one she sees. It was touching to an enormous degree, because it’s the piece that’s been missing in my relationships for a long time.

What invariably happens, and I will use Argo as an example because she’s the best one, is that people read my web site and fall in love with my words until they can see themselves in it…. and then once they can, they hate it. They don’t necessarily like the mirror I hold up, because sometimes the truth is too real and sometimes they don’t think I’ve gotten it “write” at all. But the truth is that there is a comments section, I have an e-mail address, and I’m easy to find on Facebook and Twitter. Disagree with me all you like, and don’t think you don’t have a voice because I am very good about calling myself out on my own bullshit…. and at the same time, I change my mind a lot, so if you read an entry from last week, it may or may not contain the same sentiments, and it’s not because I’m just trying to be an asshole…. it’s that NEW SHIT HAS COME TO LIGHT.

And secondly, I just don’t care about your feelings, and not because I’m trying to be an asshole about that, either. It’s that this space is not for you. It’s for me, and if you don’t like it, CHANGE THE CHANNEL. The things you say to me do cut me, deeply, but not enough to make your opinion more important than mine so that I stop writing altogether. Clever Title tanked, and it was even more popular than Stories. I had a few famous followers and I was getting big in my own right. If I’d stayed consistent, I wouldn’t have been Dooce-level by now, but I might be able to work part-time, because I got in when blogs were all the rage and now everyone and their dog has one and it’s harder to stand out. So I suppose it’s a double-edged sword. Your words get to me, and I take them in, but to care about them than I do more than I care about myself is defeating the purpose of writing altogether.

I will not let that happen again. If you see something negative written about you on this web site that you don’t like, remember that if I come knocking on your door, you’ve probably done something to get me there. But our relationship on the ground has nothing to do with this web site unless you let it. Me blowing off steam so that I can have different interactions in real life is because I’ve had time to think in longhand, and I would hope that is worth more to you than me just shooting my mouth off on the “think it, say it” plan.

Because it worked out so well for me last night.

Jill (Nin-Jill, Jill-o shot, Jillicious) was so funny when she said that based on the timestamp of my last post, I probably needed A LOT of coffee. She wasn’t wrong, but I’m not nearly as tired as I thought I would be. I did the exact same thing I did every night (Pinky), except for the fact that I took a Sudafed as well. Sudafed is one of those drugs that keeps me awake even if I’m on a morphine IV drip. In fact, I can take Sudafed and Benedryl at the same time, and THAT is saying something. Taking Benadryl all on its own is inviting the type hangover where your entire morning feels like trying to nail Jell-o to a wall.

So what did I do this morning? I took all my morning drugs, including some more Sudafed, and left for SBUX at 6:51. Sudafed and coffee are an excellent replacement for sleep, especially since I am normally asleep before 9:00 so that I can keep my early mornings sacred. So I might be a little sleep-deprived today, but I won’t be tomorrow.

For those of you that have a computer hooked up to your TV and use the Kodi app (cross-platform, although the most annoying is that Windows Media Center went out with Windows 7 and it was the one app from M$FT I actually *liked*), I was mostly playing  with the Jamendo add-on for Kodi music. Jamendo is a catalog of unsigned artists, and you can download anything as long as it’s not for commercial use…. Although you do not have to download anything. You can stream everything rather than saving it to your local hard drive, or in my case, “Goliath,” the nickname for my 3TB drive.

My rent includes cable, but because of Kodi, I don’t use it. I might if I get a TV card for my laptop, but it has all the channels I’d normally watch. Right now I’m hooked on “The Fosters” and “Switched at Birth” on ABC Family. My favorite video add-on is PBS ThinkTV, where I can catch up on everything from History Detectives to American Experience. Also, “Geek and Sundry” has a channel with shows like “The Guild” and “Tabletop.” The reason I want to get a TV card before I hook up my cable is that with streaming media, I don’t have to be home when the show airs… but I do miss things like live debates. The TV card would allow me to record in real time, like a free and open source Tivo.

I leave my laptop plugged in like a desktop all the time now, because my iPad mini and my Bluetooth keyboard have replaced it entirely. My mom and my aunt Nancy went in together and got me some Best Buy money for Christmas, and the Bluetooth keyboard is seriously the best thing I’ve ever bought for myself. It has what most nerds would call a “KVM switch,” and that means there is a dial on the left side that allows me to pair with three devices. My iPad is one, my phone is two, and my computer is 3. When I do bother to carry my computer, I carry a mouse and this keyboard so that my palm doesn’t accidentally hit the touchpad and erase everything I wrote (recoverable with CTRL-Z) or somehow changes the page from WordPress to something else (not recoverable, even with a lot of swearing in its general direction). The other cool thing is that the keyboard works on two AAA batteries, which means that even on the go, I can recharge it easily… and I haven’t changed the batteries in months.

And now that I’ve talked about the fabulousness of my keyboard, I want to talk about eventually getting a new phone. Right now I have a pretty sweet deal. I’m on my dad’s business plan, and I only pay $20.00 for voice and data. I don’t want to lose that price, and I don’t want to make my dad sign a contract for my new phone, either. I’m wondering if a 3G + wifi tablet will let me use navigation in the car, because those are relatively cheap and I want an Android, because most of them come with radios and an expansion slot, and 9/10ths of what I listen to is NPR… which is why back in the day I bought a Zune over the iPod. Additionally, Android has two things going for it that blow the iPhone out of the water. A) It’s compatible with Linux. II) It doesn’t encrypt your music so you can drag and drop from your music library to your phone and back again.

iPhones are perfect except for the fact that the storage space is so small and you can’t add more. I can fill up the entire thing in three days with podcasts (I download them over wifi so that I’m not using mobile data in the car- same with Amazon Music). I thought about getting an MP3 player that I could load up, which would have been perfect when I was taking the Metro everywhere, but I can only drive two or three places without navigation. Check this out! I can finally get to work without turning on my GPS! #smallblessings

Plus, even when I know where I’m going, the directions do two things for me. The first is to keep me concentrated on where I’m going and how fast I’m driving (Waze has a spedometer on the left-hand side). The second is that when my mind wanders off into space with all of my mind-worms, I don’t forget where I’m going, miss my exit, and show up late because I am directionally challenged…. VERY directionally challenged. I don’t even know how to read a map properly. If I was dropped off pretty much anywhere out of my comfort zone, you might as well just say, “I’ll miss you.”

Yesterday I discovered a gorgeous drive, from my house in Silver Spring to Nathan’s house in Alexandria. For the life of me, I can’t remember how I got there, because I don’t do street names. As the Facebook wisdom goes, “bitch, do I turn left or right at McDonald’s?) The other cool thing, besides it being drop dead gorgeous even in the pouring rain, was that I passed the CIA campus in Langley and it reminded me of every “Covert Affairs” episode ever. Annie Walker goes that way at least once an episode, and because everything past the exit is pretty much a restricted access road, that’s the only real part of the drive you see. For a split second, I imagined that someone was tailing me just because I could. That show is GOLDEN. You can watch it all on Amazon Prime, and even though there are situations that could only happen on TV, Valerie Plame is the technical consultant on the show, so I know at least some of it is real. For instance, I did not know that Langley has a food court, and when I found that out, I thought it was really interesting, so I Googled it and what came back was lots of employees complaining how bad the food is. You’d think that with all the tax money that goes into military/intelligence you’d at least be able to get fresh bread at Subway. But no one asked me.

Seriously, if you haven’t seen Covert Affairs, drop everything. It reminds me a lot of “Alias,” because have you ever seen Jennifer Garner and Piper Perabo in the same room? Check that shit out. Also, not sure that Victor Garber was actually on Alias. I think it was Merrick Garland… you basically have to save up if you want to work for the government….. One of the things that the show points out is that for all the danger that the agents are in, they’re still paid regular government salaries. Things like big, shiny cars and millions of dollars wired into accounts don’t make the agents themselves rich. It’s the government’s money. They just get to decide what to do with it and then go home and eat macaroni and cheese. I suppose that the money comes in when you are so busy you don’t have time to spend any of it.

Government salaries are so wacky. I hate it that most CEOs make more than the President, because it’s not like he’s not busy or anything. Plus, most beginning jobs in the military are only a few steps above peanuts and popcorn…. but again, the money comes in because you are entirely too busy to spend it.

It’s also fucked up that you can either work for the government for a pittance, or negotiate a contract as a private entity and make five times as much. I would much rather give that money to the boots on the ground, because even though we’re spending tons on weaponry, we don’t always make sure that the “boots” have enough shoes, clothing, etc. My friend Volfe actually had to *buy* extras. That is a special kind of incompetence…. military intelligence at its finest.

I waffle back and forth over whether I want to date a soldier. Because first of all, damn they’re hot. DAMN. Second of all, though, and this is the hard part, I’ve already belonged to a military family once (Dana’s dad was a Marine in the JAG) and every time the family got together, we’d get ten minutes into a conversation and I wouldn’t understand anything. Too many acronyms, too little time. I also don’t know how to read “fruit salad,” so I don’t know what rank to call people and/or how important they are.

But did I mention that DAMN, they’re hot? I would let them bench press me any day of the week. Samantha says that I need to date one of the women that just completed Ranger School, and I’m all like, “first of all, how would I meet them? Second of all, how in the hell would I broach the subject?” In DC, it is REALLY hard to tell the difference between soldier and lesbian. I should know. I get thanked for my service more frequently than one would think, and I am giving my camo t-shirt to Goodwill because of that very reason. At first, I thought it was cute. Now I just think it’s disrespectful. It would look cute on an eight-year-old where it’s clear the camo is just for fashion. On me, it looks like I just got out of basic.

No one is out of the realm of possibilities as to who I would and would not date. I’m just saying that with the military, there would be a steep learning curve, because I didn’t get it the first time around.

But did I mention they were hot?

This is an exercise that the kids went through at CYM (Cooperative Youth Ministry). It’s not my place to give answers there, but I can here:

• I find strength in…
  • Watching others’ success and knowing that if they are capable of great things, so am I.
• My heart goes out to…
  • As the Book of Common Prayer says, “the sick, the friendless, and the needy.”
• I put my faith in…
  • Two boxes. One is academic and wants to know everything there is to know about every story in the Bible… every piece of commentary, etc. The other is the hope  that the God piece in me recognizes the God piece in you, especially when we’re in conflict, because that’s when it needs recognition the most.
• So much calls out for my attention…
  • And most of it is ego-driven as opposed to societally placed.
• I find joy in…
  • Driving around DC, knowing that in terms of the United States, I live “where the history comes from.”
• I am overwhelmed when…
  • I am scared to ask for help.
• I am grateful for…
  • My divorce, because it is hard to find yourself and worry about someone else at the same time, because your energy is too divided to answer the really hard questions.
• I am frustrated by….
  • Christians who think the building is the church.
• What matters now is…
  • Erasing a lifetime of defining myself by how someone else is doing.
• I feel weary when…
  • I tell someone I want to be a writer/theologian/pastor, because those words are so loaded. Christianity has been boxed into a very narrow definition, and it’s a bad one…. and a long conversation has to follow about why I’m not representative of that idea. It’s not that I’m tired of people asking questions. I’m tired of the idea that “Christian” represents one type of person to the masses, and most people have no idea what a denomination is and how there is no polity between The Church of Christ and The United Church of Christ. It is like comparing donuts to Chevrolets, and yet, we are both called Christians.
• I hope to…
  • Influence people from afar… that things I say stay with them even when we don’t know each other.
  • Find a partner, when I am capable of handling that type relationship.
  • Find new friends who will one day become my old friends.
  • Resolve the “having a kid” issue one way or the other. It is a deep grey area, and not too much fun, because the physical and hormonal realities of a biological imperative are crazymaking even when you’re sure you don’t want a kid at all. Logic and brain chemicals are not the same thing.
  • Preach in front of hundreds of people, because I am much more fun in person than I could ever be on this web site.
• My own life is…
  • Perfect in all of its flaws, failures, and vulnerabilities.
• One thing I can do is…
  • Empathize to an enormous degree.
• I seek…
  • Not a higher calling, but the first couple of rungs at the bottom of the ladder. I seek how to get there from here.
• I will…
  • Write… perhaps not well… but with consistency and drive and passion and all of the things that define me as a writer. The definition is not given based on quality, but quantity…. kind of like you have to take a thousand pictures to get ten outstanding ones.
• I need…
  • To spend more time with my family. Seeing Nate, Emily, and the kids reminded me of the importance of their presence in my life, because oh, how we laughed.
• I join with….
  • My fellow UCC members in affirming that #blacklivesmatter.
• I am restored by…
  • Going to bed early or large cups of coffee. Usually with the former, I do not require the latter.
• May I …
  • Ask you to pray for me?

My alarm went off at 6:00 AM, and normally I am out the door by 7:00 so that I can get a cup of coffee and sit and write for a while. I know I’ve told you this is my schedule on weekdays, but I try to keep it up on weekends, too. This morning, I stayed in bed and listened to podcasts until 9:30. On Saturdays, I have nowhere to be at any certain time. On Sundays, church does not start until 10:30. Being at SBUX early in the morning is a constant, a need for an ADD person. It settles my mind and my body and just allows it to relax. I have said this before, but I need to do some research and go on a diet. Not to lose weight. I’m doing fine in that department. At the doctor’s office, I was 126 with my clothes and shoes on.

No, this diet needs to be researched to see what the superfoods are for brain health and the things I need to stop eating. I’m guessing McDonald’s is at the top of the list. “Forgive me, Father. I know not what I do.” It’s just that with All-Day breakfasts and those little Fillet-O-Fishes with their Old Bay tartar sauce, sometimes the mind is strong and the heart is weak.

It reminds me of when Dana and I were thinking of conceiving, and the way she was so cute at designing my pregnancy diet, and a diet for the baby (babies?) once he/she/they were born. It is just one of the many things I miss about my beloved Dana, and I choose to remember the things that make me smile about her.

For instance, because our OB/GYN told us that since I was 35, it would be considered a geriatric pregnancy, I was convinced that I’d have to use Clomid and thus end up with multiples. I didn’t think I was going to be the “OctoMom” or anything, just that the percentage of having twins or triplets was higher with my age because of what needed to be done to get me pregnant in the first place. Dana was officially Not. Impressed. She didn’t think I was going to have twins, and I didn’t want it to be a complete shock to both of us. With Clomid, twins happen.

Although the way Clomid works, it releases more than one egg at a time for fertilization in hopes that at least one of them implants. They would have been fraternal, as different as night and day, but they looked real in my dreams until Dana and I realized that since our jobs had changed, so had our money situation, and even if we’d managed to get sperm absolutely free, it was unfair to bring a baby into the world in poverty. We could barely manage ourselves, much less another person along for the ride.

I’m thinking about that journey today because Samantha and I were talking about babies and I told her that at this point in my life, if I wanted to have more than one kid, I wanted to have twins. Let’s just get all the diapers, bottles, etc. out of the way all at the same time. Twins don’t work that way. You can’t just magically ask for them without spending lots of money, but one geriatric pregnancy is all I really want to handle. After that, I want to drink my Ensure, take my Centrum Silver, and buy a TV without a remote, because hey, I have twins.

We had names picked out, we read all the books, and we watched and waited. It’s a good thing that we waited, because the last thing I ever would have wanted in this divorce is a custody battle.

But that whole going through a pregnancy thing is slipping through my fingers, and I’m not sure that it matters anymore. I think it will depend on how bad my next partner wants children, and how old we are when we get together.

And oh, how I dream about her. I don’t know what she looks like, but I know that of all the Washington jobs, she has an exciting one. Maybe she’s in Iraq or Syria or Egypt and that’s why we haven’t found each other yet. Maybe neither of us have been invited to the same party where we have a chance to see each other across a crowded room. And finally, maybe it’s because I’m not looking. You can’t win the lottery if you don’t buy a ticket.

My marriage to Dana lasted almost eight years, and she was my best friend long before that. It’s not something you get over easily or quickly, and I fear that meeting someone new is just dragging them into the morass of my own grief, because when that person comes along, I want to be able to dream into the future without looking at anything in my past, because it’s already been dealt with, blessed and released so that it doesn’t keep coming back to haunt me.

In short, in order to get what I want, I have to do my own work, first. I have to know that I can stand on my own two feet, that I have a network of friends that are as important to me as any significant other, and money to my name so that there is not a class imbalance, either. This is because if the relationship doesn’t work out, I need my friends. And being stuck in that loop where one person has to pay all the time creates resentment, quick, even if it’s polite.

So I save all my pennies for the future, and I keep exploring myself for all my flaws and failures in all of my relationships, not just the most recent one. The only way for it to be different is for me to be different.

And at the same time, letting go of Dana is absolutely the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my life, but as necessary to my own sanity as getting the hell out of Houston. I wasn’t trying to run away from my problems, but in a sense, go back to the scene of the crime. Kathleen embarrassed the hell out of me by sleeping with coworkers at ExxonMobil, so not only did I know, so did *everyone else.* But as I got further along in my recovery from that garbage dump of a relationship, I began to look at all the things I did wrong in that relationship so I wouldn’t feel so much like a victim. It’s like when a football game comes down to one field goal and the kicker misses. The losing team didn’t lose because of that one missed kick. That was just the last thing that happened.

The adultery trump card for Kathleen was not the be-all and end-all of our divorce. It was just the last thing that happened. I was seriously mentally ill because at the time, I did not have health insurance and didn’t want to go to the doctor for fear of cost. This is just conjecture on my part, but I think that Kathleen was finding out her bisexuality only extended so far, and she wanted to be married to a man. She is, now, with two kids and I hope that life makes her more happy than I ever could.

I have a lot to work through just being in this city; my memories are not all happy ones. But slowly, I am chipping away at the person I have been in the past, and trying hard to change the things I don’t like.

For instance, I don’t like it when I get angry, especially at people I love… because I’m never sure if I’m lashing out at the right person. I have the emotional right to be angry, and to express it, but not if the underlying issue is with one person and I’m taking it out on someone else.

And this is the road that leads me back to my precious Argo, always, because she was the person that got the most misdirected anger, probably because I couldn’t see her, therefore, she was not real. It’s a fucked up perspective, that’s for damned sure, but I know that our conversations would have gone differently face-to-face. That I could have told her how funny and amazing she was in person, and if we had something serious to talk about, I would have been able to see her emotions and respond to them. We talked about Skyping once, the three of us as not to leave Dana out, and for some reason or another it did not happen. I think it would have made all the difference to be able to see the facial expressions and the laughter that made her real, instead of “The Velveteen Argo.”

It also would have made a difference if she’d become friends with both Dana and me, because on the surface, she was. But underneath, I was her frien. It’s not unusual for one person to be closer to one half of a couple than the other, but Dana was threatened that someone else was impinging on her territory. She was my best friend. The way I saw it, when Dana married me, she got a promotion and the friend slot was left vacant. Dana couldn’t be everything to me all the time, and neither could Argo. They fed different parts of my brain without ever crossing over, because the things Dana and I talked about were *way* different than any conversation I had with Argo. It was at that point that I began to understand polyamory, not for myself, but as an idea. That it really was a thing, whereas before I’d dismissed it outright. Polyamory, like alcohol, is wonderful….. for other people.

I’d never had a close friend that confided in me to that degree, and so it took me a long time to realize two things:

• Any philia/eros wires that got crossed in my brain about Argo’s friendship with me were due to the fact that my very first “my parents didn’t pick you” friend crossed those same wires.
• I had a chord running from me to Argo (I used to joke that I put Red Bull in it when she was tired), and just because her philia/eros wires weren’t crossed in the same way mine were, that didn’t mean that I didn’t mean a whole hell of a lot to her and it would have been devastating to pick up my toys and leave.

My fucked up wiring didn’t allow for adult women friendship, because it had never been modeled for me in the right way. So, I did what any self-respecting nerd would do. I bought a lot of books on the subject. I knew that our relationship was faltering under an enormous weight (Dana’s jealousy, my crossed wires and inexplicably intense anger), but it was my hope that I could learn to be a good friend and that 20 years from now, we’d be sitting on a porch somewhere with coffee or Jack Daniels or both while Dana rocked the babies in transition from sleeping to wakefulness and brought them out to the porch so that Argo could coo over them and talk about how big they’d gotten since the last time she was there.

It’s a dream that’s hard to give up, because it was never my intention to rip things apart permanently, and now that I have, it is breathing through pain as if it is labor. Trauma lamaze, if you will.

In my smallest, most still voice, what I wanted was for Argo to be family. For the jealousy to go away. For me to be healthy and able to navigate my issues so that years from now, we could laugh about how silly it was not to meet in person right away. A 3D future would have changed the narrative, but there is no going back.

I just need to be whole and secure in myself before I take on a dream this big again.