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.

After I got finished at the doctor’s office, I got my prescriptions and went back to work. I didn’t really want to, but there was just too much to do to stay home. Besides, I’ll likely have to take off some time next week so I can get a new patient appointment with my PCP. The best part is that the PA gave me some Ultram, so I am not bothered by my abdomen as I am working away. I just hope it’s not something serious, because that would put my coworkers in a bind, and that’s the last thing I want to do at this early stage in the game.

I am sticking to the clear liquid diet, because I got the herbal Oprah Chai instead of the black. I’m going to load it up with Splenda and just pretend there’s milk in it. I’m also going to stop by 7-Eleven, because I’ve found a couple of great flavors, although the salty green is still my favorite after all these years. My second favorite is cucumber limon, which makes the best N/A margarita on earth. For $1.50, I can feel like I’m sitting on a beach somewhere. It reminds me of the margaritas at Tapalaya, where Ryan always made cucumber-infused tequila for the margaritas, a little bit of heaven on earth.

I’ve found that my mission in life is to find all the gorgeous mocktails, because now my taste buds have changed and there are very few drinks I actually like. Scales made me an Aperol Spritzer the other night, and it was delicious. But alcohol is not something I generally seek out, having worked in a bar and a restaurant and having enough alcohol to last my whole life. And then Dana started working at a liquor store and there was temptation all around that I just wasn’t into anymore.

It all started with Aaron, who doesn’t drink at all, and I didn’t want to be the douche that drank in front of him because I Wanted him to be comfortable at our house. And then I found that I liked not drinking A LOT. And if it is doing anything to my health, I’m not sure it has anything to do with this issue particularly, but I do feel 100% better when my psych meds and my cocktails aren’t duking it out for attention.

I was in a bad way, not in the alcoholic sense, because I never drunk enough to flip that switch in my brain. But I was drinking enough that taking psych meds was a placebo at best. I also didn’t want to be Dana’s drinking buddy anymore. She has other friends for that, and part of moving was quitting cold turkey. Although quitting has its parameters. I can count on both hands the number of times I’ve gone for drinks with people since I’ve been here, and can count on one finger the number of times I had a bit too much. I was on a date and nervous and drinking too fast without counting and timing. She must have thought I was always like that, because there was never a third date, and I think that was healthy. Most adults drink a lot more than I do, and it’s hard to explain. Of course I’ll have a beer with you, but I’m not going to have four. People get weird about people drinking in front of people who don’t drink, and I could frankly give a shit. Drinking is wonderful….. for other people.

After Dana got her DUI, it opened my eyes in a way that I don’t think they’d been opened before. I learned so much from all the medical professionals that did her classes that I didn’t think I had any more brain cells to lose. I didn’t want to be that person anymore. I wanted to be whole and healthy within myself, and though I don’t think I need AA, I do wish there was a group called “people who don’t drink but still can’t get their shit together.” I think it would take off like gangbusters. My time in Al-Anon was productive, and I want to go back to it if I can find a meeting relatively close to me. It’s amazing how well I was wired and gaslit to think that my childhood was normal and I could handle it, no problem. Daddy can do dis, all day, every day. And yet, I couldn’t.

My teenage years roiled inside me until I hit a breaking point, and the only thing I found that helped was sharing stories with other people who’d stood in my shoes, or at least could tell where they pinched. I am not the person I want to be quite yet, but I am making amazing headway. They say that physical moves do not work, because wherever you go, there you are. You’re still you, and you have the capability to create the same problems in different places. In this case, I think I’ve bucked tradition. I’ve been to hell and back with the Argo situation, because her ego was so enormous that she made this move all about her and in no way thought I was reaching for something better, something different, running back instead of forward to a place I never should have left…. and in that case, we probably wouldn’t have met each other, anyway, and it wouldn’t be a deal for me to be here because how would she know to care?

She couches ego in being “proactive,” and I couch ego in “leave me the fuck alone, because this is not about you.” It’s about building myself up so that I have an ego again. One that sustains me instead of disappearing when I need it the most. One that makes me feel like I have a real shot at accomplishing my dreams, instead of a hermit who feels like she can never leave her house. One that assures me that I am in the right place, at the right time, and just because this friendship went wrong, that doesn’t mean all of them will. Scales said that I was just so easy to be around, and I said, “that’s the first time I’ve heard that one in a while. Thank you so much. Sincerely.”

One of these days, I will meet someone who will sweep me off my feet, and by then, I hope to have the resources to return their affections wholeheartedly. I’m not there yet. But I will be. I just don’t want anything casual. I’d rather hold out for Princess Charming, and in DC that could mean everything from being a politician’s wife to a diplomat’s wife to a Bond girl…. although if I was a Bond girl, I wouldn’t be allowed to know it. So perhaps I need someone in DC who can actually tell me what they do…. not that anyone does…. or if they do, your eyes glaze over. But my identity is not wrapped up in these people, only my willingness to give and be interdependent so that both of our careers matter.

Because my ego allows me to have my own life, my own friends, my own.

And that’s all I’ve ever wanted DC to be.

I got myself to work this morning just in time to have hair-raising diarrhea, then go back to my desk, and ten minutes later run for another round. By this time, I asked my boss if I could work from home, because if this was going to keep up, I could work just fine, but I wanted my own bed and my own bathroom. He said that I could take some leave, but he couldn’t authorize work from home. So I knew I had some stuff in production this afternoon, and told him I would try to be back later. I went directly to CVS and bought some Immodium and took two. The plan was to go home and get some rest, letting the meds have some time to kick in and maybe fit in another dose if the first one didn’t do the job.

Over the past two nights, I’ve had pain on the left side of my abdomen, and it wasn’t that bad. I got in the car to drive home and had to stop on the side of the road, I was in so much pain. I decided to skip the trip home and went back to Urgent Care, after calling my primary care doctor and them telling me they wouldn’t see me until I’d had a new patient appointment, even though I was telling them I was in distress. I didn’t have much time to be angry about it. I was crying the pain was so bad, and that is unusual because I don’t cry. I just don’t. Especially since I take medication for anxiety, there’s nothing that rattles me much anymore. So, I took that as a sign to just get to any doctor as fast as I could.

The last time I had this pain, I was lying on a bed in the hallway at Inova Fairfax, where upon pelvic exam they thought it could be appendicitis and gave me enough morphine to tranquilize an elephant. I’m fairly certain that part of giving me such a large dose was to make me utterly uncaring that they had no beds and I was just right out there, hanging in the hallway……

But then the doctor said that it was what they call a urachal remnant, a medical condition that occurs in a lot of babies where the urachus doesn’t close all the way after disconnecting from the umbilical cord. Most people don’t notice unless it gets infected, which is why I was just right out there, hanging in the hallway…

So, it feels like the same kind of pain, but the PA said that it was probably diverticulitis. This does not feel right to me, as I have not eaten anything that would irritate my colon like that in weeks (salads, popcorn, etc.). It also doesn’t make sense that in the last month, I’ve had a Z-Pack and Augmentin and started Bactrim today, so if the diagnosis of “urachal remnant” was correct, how could it have gotten infected in the first place? Between the pain in my gut and the pneumonia that will not take its fries and drive the fuck thru, I am feeling pretty punk.

When the nurse palpated my abdomen, she said, “well, you could be pregnant!” I said, “I know I’m not.” She said, “well….. you never know!” Like she was trying to cheer me up. Seriously. Inside my head I’m thinking, “she can SEE ME, right?” I posted this on Facebook and Auna said, “spit don’t make no babies.” I said, “neither does abstinence.”

I still practiced my “Mom, I’ve had an Immaculate Conception” speech just in case. When the PA came into the room, he palpated my abdomen to the point I was crying again and told me my UA was clean, another surprise because I thought it might be a bladder infection of some sort.

He put me on a clear liquid diet for today and tomorrow, then some toast if I felt up to it on Saturday.

And just in case you’re wondering, this post makes me feel a thousand years old.

This morning, the dark roast at Starbucks is the French roast. Apparently, they have stopped calling it “The Bold Pick,” because the last few times I have ordered as such, they’ve looked at me like I was from the moon until the manager told them what it was. It’s awesome that with my gold status, I can get a large cup of coffee for less than three dollars, and fill it up as much as I want. Although with 20 oz, I normally get a cup on the way in and a cup for the drive to DSI, about 20 minutes away. Even without free refills, though, sometimes I go to 7-Eleven, because they have finally made the Slurpee of my dreams- Diet Cherry Coke. It’s not calorie free, but 50 calories for a 24 oz is not bad. I’m sure they do it to cover up the aspartame aftertaste, and it works well… except I like the aspartame aftertaste. I’m not a real soprano without it.

How many sopranos does it take to change a lightbulb?

Two. One to hold the Diet Coke and one to get the accompanist to do it.

Last night I went straight home and got in bed. This pneumonia is hanging on for all it’s worth, and I am only now starting to notice a difference since I’ve been on the Augmentin for six days. The cough, however, is not budging. As you walk to the back corner of DSI, it starts to sound like a TB ward… although it’s nice that my office mate has officially, officially moved out and all her crap is gone, so now I really have my own office. I’m not bothering anyone with my sickness unless someone comes in to talk to me, and right now, they know better. Maybe I should make a recording of myself coughing for those days when I don’t want to deal with people. 🙂

I am really starting to learn what it means to move on without Argo in my life, and it’s scary and wonderful all at the same time. I miss her, but not at the cost of my own sanity. I am still the sweet, lovable nerd she met in the beginning, but apparently there is no way to show it. It’s all so fucking sad, because I truly didn’t mean any harm, and I was hoping that she’d continue to buck the mainstream and we’d keep talking, keep building each other up, keep working towards wholeness in a world that is continually broken.

I was talking to Scales about it the other night, and she said something about me “still being in it.” That perhaps I’m still in love with Argo and don’t realize it consciously. I don’t think she’s right, and I said so. I said, “there’s a difference between losing someone you love, and someone you’re in love with. Losing Dana and Argo at basically the same time was taking both my right and left hands away simultaneously.”

I know within myself that the Eros feelings I had given the enormous amount of truth we shared are over. I don’t have these dreams that haunt me anymore, and I don’t spend my days wishing that things could have been different. They just are the way they are, you know? Whatever was supposed to happen did. I will find other friends, and have, but I won’t forget her, just like I’ll never forget the other important turns my life has taken, both away from myself and back inward. Just like with Dana, I had to spend my time in the desert figuring all this shit out. And like I said before, leaving Dana was easier because there were things roiling under the surface of our perfectness that created a storm within both of us that we could not talk about… would not talk about. Dana and I both wanted out, and with Argo, that was never the case. I’d get mad at her escalated language and fire right back, when the right thing to do was respond with more love, more care, more thoughtfulness. But at the same time, when I did remember to do those things, even being nice to her was frought with being wrong. I couldn’t win, and not for lack of trying. She told me she had friends that would rage if we were still in contact, and first of all, I didn’t realize that I was up for discussion. And second of all, she said that she was not interested in following “mainstream anything,” two words that I carried in my heart until I realized that she was playing me. Being my friend was not a way to be my friend, but to keep an eye on me to make sure I didn’t get any closer than she wanted me to be. I didn’t want to be that person. I wanted to be that person she could come to with anything, but that time in our lives was over.

I never got the chance to be free and easygoing with her, like in the beginning when she said that she was much more fun and funny in person, and I couldn’t wait to see what she meant by that. Girl giggling and meeting each other’s eventual significant others and eating bacon in our pajamas.

But I couldn’t be seen in that way anymore, and for that, I regret, but I don’t choose to focus on it all the time, because I have plenty of people to eat bacon with, except for Pri-Diddy, because she is a vegan…. although I do like the vegan bacon at Sticky Fingers Bakery, so there’s something.

I really do love Dana with everything that is within me, but there’s another relationship that I’ll never get back, because she doesn’t trust me as far as she can throw me and I feel exactly the same way. There were only a few things that I felt I could confide in her, Argo being one of them, and everything else was fair game. Anything and everything I said was likely to pop out at one time or another. And perhaps it was a mistake to let Dana into the Argo part of my life, but it seemed utterly wrong not to. Married couples that hide their crushes destroy their relationships from the inside out, whereas naming it helps it to go away, helps it to refocus on the relationship with each other. But it is my belief that by the time I’d started confiding that stuff in her, she wanted out, and Argo was the easiest shortcut to get me to go ballistic in a hot second. I knew I had enough love within me to love both of them, as long as I took care of my problems appropriately, and I did…. it was just that time ran out with both of them to prove it.

Dana was part of my heartbeat, whereas Argo was just my beautiful, rule-breaking moth. My poetic and noble land mermaid. The person who, to me, was brilliant and kind and stupid hot. These are all taken from Leslie Knope Galentine’s Day cards, and in no way meant to indicate romance. Although my favorite was when we were discussing boundaries and I said, jokingly, “I don’t like it that you’re funnier than me. Could you tone it down? Noooooooooo…….

We had a lot of fights that were just redirection that cost us time because we were talking about surface issues instead of what’s really wrong. For instance, I have been doing this Internet thing a long time. Gender and sexuality fly out the window for me, because my sexuality is in no way binary. She needed me to have a better boundary there, and I tried so hard…. until I realized that the shortest and easiest path to getting her to go away was to say all these things I didn’t mean in order to push her away from sharing her truth, because every time she did, my heart would squeeze into a vice and I couldn’t think about anything else. My relationships all suffered, because I didn’t belong to a community anymore. I isolated as far as I could so that I could wait for the familiar ding of my phone.

Argo never would have wished that on me, but I couldn’t help it. Her life was a series of crazy with crazy sauce, and I worried like a mother hen, when I should have been worrying about Dana and Aaron in the same way… the ones who were dealing with my own crazy with crazy sauce.

I just burned on re-entry. Dana didn’t want to talk to me anymore, to the point where we were having a ocmpletely calm conversation where she was asking me questions. I was sitting on the floor facing her bedroom, not getting any closer, because I knew the questions she was asking me were hard and required me to dig deep. But she didn’t want to listen to the answers, and when I gave them, called my dad and said that I was having a “psychotic episode.” My dad told me to hand the phone over, and when he realized that I was calm and collected, he told me to go to bed, that nothing was going to get done, and to stop trying.

So I did.

I locked myself in my office with enough sleeping pills to knock me out for a day and a half, and I must say it was the right thing to do. Everything looked better with a truly good night’s sleep. But Dana still didn’t want to talk to me, to address our issues, without leaving them as our issues. Argo made me feel like a million dollars when she said, “surely you realize that one of the reasons I backed away from you was so that I wouldn’t be Dana’s excuse anymore.” And no, I didn’t realize that at all. I thanked her for picking up something that I didn’t, and said, “good call.” I told Dana what she said, and she surprised me. She said she was sorry that my friend pulled away because of something she did. It made me feel like a million dollars, and I sent Argo another thank-you note that she’d helped me make even more progress with Dana because she GOT IT, and that part had been missing for a long time…. because it wasn’t just about me anymore. I can’t imagine what it was like for Argo to give her heart to me in hopes that we could make a friendship that was strong and comfortable, and then to step into dysfunction up to her ass.

But she didn’t. Dana was ready to go, and didn’t know how to say it, so Argo was so convenient as an excuse not to talk to me about our own issues. Argo’s sexuality is binary, always has been, and there was nothing I could do that would change it, and I didn’t even want to. Anything that I sent her along those lines was predicated by, “I know this is not your reality, but these are the feelings that are troubling me, not something for which I expect a response.” And besides, any romantic relationship with Argo would have gone about as well as a dumpster fire. In a way, Dana, Argo, and I were all raised by the same dad. And I’m going to let that sentence hang right there, because the three of us all know what that means, and needs no explanation to anyone else.

Plus, I didn’t want to fuck each other up any worse than we already had. I only wanted goodness, sweetness, and light to win out, but it couldn’t, because instead of letting our rabbit hole sustain us, we became cut from the same cloth, defenses in place so that neither one could let down the protective walls that didn’t start out with bullet-proof vests under our t-shirts, just devolved into it over time.

I wish I could go back to the time in my life where I was so excited to meet her, so excited to invite her into my life for real so that the 3D version of me was what she knew instead of an Internet troll with a God complex. I became this narcissistic bully with no ability to fold, and so did she. So there was no going back, as much as I loved her, prayed for her, wished her well.

And now I talk to her in my head all the time, because when I do that, I get the responses I want, rather than taking the chance that she’s going to come back at me with escalated language, or that I will send her any. We are at peace, for the first time in years, because according to the Argo in my head, my glasses are cute, I will find the woman of my dreams, and she is the angel cheerleader that sits on my shoulder as I find my way through life.

Scales said that she felt bad about the comment where she said she didn’t think that this was the end, that we seem to wax and wane, because she didn’t mean to cause me grief. And I told her that grief was always a double-edged sword… that even though I felt pain, I also felt like a million dollars remembering my Argo-given nickname and for one second, I felt complete and whole within myself, because the ability to remember with happiness outweighed the ability to look back in anger.

And on that note, it’s time for my re freefill and get to work.

See you on the flip side.

I have a friend that I keep up with through Facebook named Karen, and I found out that her son just graduated at college. Years ago, we were pretty tight, when her son was ten. My favorite memory of him is that his older sister had something to do, and Karen had to bring her home, so I offered to take M___ so he didn’t have to wait around. When we got to his house, I tucked him into bed, read him a story, kissed the top of his head, and turned out the light. It was a turning point in my life, one in which I knew that whether I had kids or not, I’d be good at it, when the tape running through my head said that I wouldn’t. For instance, I also made him a mix CD (that ages me) called “M___’s Mega Mix,” with stuff like The White Stripes, Cake, etc. He gave me a thank-you note written in purple marker, just one of the many things I’ve lost in moves over the years that is precious to me and I wish I’d taken better care of it. I lamented to Karen that the kids were growing up so fast, and she said, “that’s the problem with children….. they grow.”

Seeing M’s grad pictures reminded me of all the funny things that happened between Karen and me, like going to Starbucks. I ordered some foofy drink with chocolate and mint, and she ordered a soy latte with classic syrup, saying, “flavored coffee is for young people.” I still laugh about that one, and because that’s what I’m thinking about, that’s exactly what I’m drinking this morning as I write.

Possibly the best story involving Karen’s kids is her youngest. At the time, she was six, and Karen was making brownies. Karen said, “adults are allowed to have their brownies in the living room, and kids have to stay in the kitchen.” Six-year-old E looked at the plate of brownies, me, and back to the plate of brownies before she said, “ARE YOU A KID OR A GROWN-UP?” Jesus, kid. Your guess is as good as mine.

Karen was such a good friend because even though there was a large age-gap between us, we were going through similar life experiences- hers a little more complicated because she was getting a divorce with children involved, and Kat and I had no assets… still traumatic, but at least no custody issues except for a duvet cover and a life-size Yoda (which she pawned for $20 just for spite… I don’t blame her. I scared the life out of her with that thing). But the point is that even though our ages didn’t match up, our mutual experiences were the same (or mostly).

They say that these are not the best of times,
but they’re the only times we’ve ever known…
And I believe there is a time for meditation
in cathedrals of our own…

Billy Joel- Summer, Highland Falls

It was a time where we both needed to breathe and stay in the same place, mourning the losses we’d just each experienced and leaning on each other for support.

It completely redirected the course of my own life, because I grew up a lot just being near someone who’d already accomplished great things and believed in me to the degree that she could. Portland was depressing and got even more so as the family I thought I knew disintegrated into nothing. At that point, I was truly inconsolable, and it took years to figure out why.

But that wasn’t until seven or 10 years later.

I had to sit in cathedrals of my own, working it out in the best way I knew how. At that time, John Strege, former choirmaster at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Portland, rescued me by helping me direct myself back into faith. I’d lost it somewhat, and the ritual of the Episcopal church and the beauty of Bach turned me back around. When I doubt that God exists, I listen to Bach’s Mass in H mol (The Kick My Mass in B Minor), because there is nothing like Et Resurrexit to prove to me that God works through music. There is nothing better than singing with people you love, feeling that God chord running through you at a heart-racing speed.

I dropped out of my own choir at CCC, because this woman came up to me and said, “you sing so loud that I cannot even hear my own part. Could you tone it down?” In the moment, I was furious, because she wasn’t coming to me from any place of authority. Balance is handled by the conductor, not some pissant alto…. but I’m not bitter. It was then that I remembered what Zach said to me, that sometimes voices are simply too large for choral singing, because being able to pull back enough to create balance physically hurts. My piano is louder than everyone else’s, not because I’m not singing more softly, but because my forte is louder than everyone else’s, too. I would be great in an opera chorus where *everyone* has the same vocal qualities I do, and perhaps I will see about joining a company if it fits into my schedule. But a relatively small church choir is not the place for me.

As for now, I sit in the congregation about halfway back, so that the congregation has a singing leader as well. I have noticed that this is not a singing church, and I’m trying to change that. Someone to help non-music readers in the pews helps immensely, because even if they don’t get it the first time around, they’ll get it the second or third. Plus, since there are no others around me, I am not competing for balance.

It also really helps with my want to work with the youth, because I am not at the church ALL DAMN DAY. And I would much rather spend time with them than the choir, because the first thing I asked Nae, the choir director, was if anyone was mean. He said no, and he was wrong about that. I wasn’t angry at taking correction, necessarily. I was angry that this person was speaking with no authority whatsoever, and if the balance was really that off, the conductor would have said something. I have had enough of choir to last my whole life, unless I can find one that has enough ringers that the balance fits me well enough that I don’t have to physically strain every week to fit in with singers who just cannot produce the volume I can, because I’m not trying to be annoying. It’s just the way I’m built, and I cannot help it any more than I can make my eyes blue.

I have Joseph Painter to thank for that. He took me through an incredible amount of breathing work so that I could find my “opera voice.” At the same time, not breathing correctly from my diaphragm was what allowed me to blend in in the first place. I didn’t have enough air support to be able to carry notes to the back of the sanctuary… and this sanctuary is twice or three times the size of Epiphany and I can still fill it with sound.

I am looking forward to working on solo music again, because the recording I did of the Pie Jesu from The Rutter Requiem was not as perfect as I wished it could have been. I mean, it was absolutely decent, but I was not in top form. When I woke up that morning, I had total and complete laryngitis and had to work myself up to being able to sing at all. Given that level of vocal distress, it is the most perfect recording in the history of recordings. But I want another recording where I literally am at the top of my game, and whether that’s Sandy Patti or Mozart, it doesn’t matter. I just want it to be mine.

Just like the moment I tucked M____ into bed. That memory was just for me.

Yesterday Scales and I met up early. We were going to just go for dinner, but we both had things we wanted to accomplish that day, so we did nothing together. It’s nice to have that friend again. With Aaron, I called it “running Aarons.” I don’t know what it’s called when Scales and I are together, except for complete and utter girl-giggling. We went to Cost Plus World Market because she wanted to pick out a Christmas gift- trying to buy early in case she really does have to move.

As an aside, I do not understand shopping except for smile.amazon.com, where a portion of my money goes to Doctors Without Borders. I don’t even try on shoes anymore.

While she checked out, I looked at the candy aisle, which for me is Christmas. I found Jelly Bellies in “draft beer.” I did not buy them, because I have enough candy to last me for a while. When I was at Dollar Tree, I found soda bottles in Dr Pepper and Orange/Grape Crush. I bought lots because it looked like overstock, and when that happens, you never know when you’re going to see that product again.

After we finished at the mall, Scales looked up a tattoo studio for me so I could go and get my earrings. Each month, I set a little money away to blow so I don’t feel poor, and this was it. I was buying these cheap studs that were starting to turn my ears green, and I was tired of it. So I asked for silver rings with red ball enclosures. As it turns out, the only color that they couldn’t anodize was red, so I settled for, you guessed it, blue balls.

At a lot of other studios, the balls are plastic beads, but at this shop, they wouldn’t do it. They don’t use plastic at all. The blue is not as dark as I would like, so perhaps I will go back to get a blue titanium ball enclosure to match the other four.

My punk hairdo also makes me look like a soldier, and the piercer said, “well, I don’tknow if you were looking for it, but you look great in your Air Force blue and silver.

Oh boy.

Air Force. Air Force?

At first, I was livid because the two soldiers I love the best are in the Army and the Marines…. or so I thought. And then I remembered what branch Ron was in, and I amended my statement quickly.

So, Air Force it is.

I need to go see if Duncan is out of the bathroom yet. I need a good fifteen or twenty minutes to wash my face and punk my hair. I can’t believe I spend money to look like I just rolled out of bed… but when I actually roll out of bed, the spot on my head where there’s no hair shows. It’s been there since I was a baby due to an EKG contact. So, looking like I just rolled out of bed is relative.

In other news, I feel 70% better today. After coffee or tea, that’ll probably add another 5%.

Because I have blue balls. I make this look good.

For my Fanagans who aren’t linked up with me on Facebook, here is a new picture so that you can see what I actually look like as opposed to the character in your head….. and Good Lord have mercy as to what that might be. The next thing I want to do is put titanium ball enclosures in all of the piercings on my earlobes, because they are hypoallergenic and I haven’t changed the ones I’m wearing since I got here… and they, to put it mildly, are not.

All I have to do now is pick what color my balls are.

Get your mind out of the gutter!

I have found that regardless of how hard I try, I always look like a hipster. My favorite outfits are preppy, but when you combine them with Converse All-Stars, a punk haircut, and specs that look like you went shopping with Ira Glass, it’s kind of unavoidable. In fact, I’m donating most of my shoes to Goodwill, because I have both brown and black All-Stars, and I hardly ever wear anything else (except for my Dr Marten’s, which don’t help my hipster case in the slightest). But perhaps it’s just that I’m on the wrong side of the tracks (or the country). I would look completely in place if I lived in Takoma Park, or in Portland, Oregon. For those of you who are unfamiliar with either, the slogan for both should be, “welcome. Here’s your brown hoodie.”

This morning, I worked for a little bit at the Dupont Starbucks, and then on impulse, texted Scales and said I was there if she wanted to meet up. We had a quick coffee and then I got back to work. I should have been blogging, but I wasn’t. I was making a shopping and a to-do list, both of which are several pages long due to all the things I have not done lately. Here’s a tip. Pneumonia sucks. Plus, the antibiotics gave me the runs and that was the one day I decided to stay home from work. Because first of all, I got maybe an hour of sleep in between all the trips to the bathroom. And secondly, pretty sure the acceptable age for shitting yourself in public ends at two. So, after four doses of atropine, I was back in my office (because my officemate moved out and I could hack up a lung in private) with *just* pneumonia.

I have too much to do to either take time off or work from home. If I take time off, no one does the things I do. If I work from home, I am distracted by every damn thing you can possibly imagine, and I leave my laptop at work not to entice me to want to work from here. I can write for 45 minutes at a clip, but eight hours chained to my own desk is far more torturous than being chained to the one at DSI. Mostly because I have three monitors, a tea kettle, way faster Internet, and company when I want it.

Speaking of company, I am trying to spend as much time as humanly possible with Scales because she may be leaving DC as well. We shall see what we shall see, but in the meantime, we weren’t supposed to get together until tomorrow for dinner and “Exploding Kittens” (I don’t know what that is… Sounds messy.). But, I thought, I was in the neighborhood anyway, so I decided to see if she was free. It was the perfect amount of time- 20 minutes. She told me what was going on in her life and I told her what was going on in mine. I told her that I’d only really had enough energy to watch TV, and even that was pushing it.

And then she surprised me. She said, “do you think this is the end of you and Argo or are you calling it?” I said, “I’m not so much calling it as saying that the next contact MUST be from her because I’m tired of the feeling that I’m just imposing on her life.” She said, “I don’t think it’s the end. You two seem to wax and wane.” I was standing up when she said it, and it was a good thing that I’d just had two Venti espresso roasts… otherwise, I would have slumped onto the floor in grief. I call Argo that because she is the ship that carried me through the worst part of my life. Her nickname for me is moon-based…. or was. The first time she named me, I wasn’t familiar with the term, and when I Googled it, I cried and cried, I was so touched.

There have been so many people for me that have hung the moon, and for the first time in my life, I got to be the moon for someone else… and no, she didn’t call me “Green Cheese,” although that is apt as well. I am very green in a lot of ways, and very cheesy in others.

Grief is so weird. It’s not linear and it’s disorienting and it goes up and down in strange ways… sometimes over months and sometimes all in the same day. There are so many adventures I wanted to have with her, to be able to share ourselves AS WE ARE as opposed to how we presented ourselves, but after this last go-round, when I thought I was being transparent about how I got lost on the way to Auto Zone and decided to turn it into a sight-seeing trip and to her it seemed like I’d planned this whole crazy stalker ruse was just too much for me. I didn’t agree that it was my reality, but I did agree with how it might have come across to her, and apologized profusely, which led to yet another fight in which we cut each other to the quick. Those we love the most know our softest spots, and we used them to disastrous effect. Everything I’d worked for in terms of Argo seeing me for who I really am instead of her preconceived notions was slashed in less than a second.

It was at that point I realized I needed some self-preservation. If all it took was one innocent mistake to return her to that dark and twisty version of me that doesn’t exist unless we are just trying to out eight-year-old each other, then I didn’t want her in my life. There’s only so many times I can hear that she regrets ever letting me into her life and taking every opportunity to remind her of it when I have worked my ass off at trying to get her to see me in the light that I want to be seen. When I remember birthdays, Christmases, holidays. When I take the time to lift her up so that she feels like a badass every morning. When I take the time to write hand-written notes instead of just e-mailing. When I take the time to CARE.

I wish that we could go back in time so that I could have gotten the help I needed not to be such an asshole to her to begin with. But if making amends over a year won’t help, then perhaps nothing will.

But there have been so many times by now that “never ever” has lasted maybe ten days at most that I don’t know what to think anymore. It’s been a month and some change, and the weight lifted off my shoulders when we “wane” is enormous.

Back in Michelangelo’s day, imperfect statues were filled in with wax to hide impurities in the cut. If the stone was carved perfectly the first time, it was called “sin cera,” or “without wax.” It is the etymology of the word “sincere.” Though neither Argo nor I was carved “sin cera,” it is my sincere hope that this is not the end of our movie. But perhaps the end of the movie is making better friends by being the friend to others that I wanted to be to her, but couldn’t get right. Maybe all this friend-grief is about making room for friendship, honest, painful, and real, without all the filled in wax of my fucked up past.

I have friends here.

I have made friends since I got here.

Painful, honest, and real.

Sin cera, hipster glasses included.

I am sitting at the Woodmoor Starbucks right off of The Beltway and Colesville Rd. so that I can get some writing done before I have to get to work in an hour. I was going to write at home, but today is my second day on antibiotics and I am sitting in the corner, away from everyone like a leper ought to be. I couldn’t do without my caffeine this morning, and I am out of coffee filters and caffeinated tea, so writing at home was just not in the cards. I am going to stop by Whole Foods on the way home, because there are certain products I can only buy there, and what I need is tea with extra buzz by Republic of Tea.™; There are several different flavors in both black and green, but my favorite is coconut black, because I don’t have to add anything to it on my way out the door. It’s already sweet enough. I thought I would get tired of it after 50 bags of coconut every day, but the coconut is just a whisper, not all-day cloying. The coffee filters are for the Christmas blend still sitting in my cabinet, because I don’t drink it that often, but it’s nice for a change.

So you might wonder why I’m on antibiotics yet again since I just had a Z-pack the last time I got a sinus infection. I didn’t think it was the best Tx either, but this time it’s pneumonia, and I’m not messing around. It got so bad that I went to urgent care and when they could hear me wheezing, I was willing to do whatever they said. This time, it’s a ten-day course of Augmentin, which I carry in my backpack so that I can take it on the way to work and on the way home without forgetting. I also have a nifty inhaler, which cost an arm and a leg, but seems to be helping and infinitely superior to steroids by mouth. They tend to make one agressive… the last time my father and my sister were on po (per oral) steroids, I thought one of them was going to move out. 😛 Of course, my sister was a teenager at the time, so it’s hard to tell between 17 and steroids… just like ADD and seven.

When I went to the pharmacy to pick up my medications, they didn’t have a 240ml bottle to put my cough syrup in, they only had one twice that size and filled it up halfway, so I look like a member of the fucking Chopped and Screwed group as I make my way through my week. It’s a good look, and remember ladies, I’m single.

I took a very strong sleeping pill last night around 7:30, knowing that the best thing I could do was get some rest, and I slept peacefully, my eyes popping open fifteen minutes before my alarm. It was another funny Dana quote kind of day, but I am too low-energy to switch back and forth between WordPress and Facebook to look them up again. But sufficed to say, laughter energized me enough to get me into a very hot shower and sit in the steam until I could talk again.

In case you’re wondering, Bryn, I haven’t returned your phone call not because I don’t love you to the moon and back, just because I can’t talk at all. Maybe a chat would be better until my voice returns?

Also, to add insult to injury, when I was sitting in the doctor’s office, I felt that very familiar pain in my abdomen of my uterus trying to fall out and I just could not even. I have pneumonia and the hassle of being both emotionally and physically laden with Aunt Flo? It’s amazing I am upright and dressed. Both of those things take energy out of me like a Dyson vacuum with the proper amount of suction. It reminds me of the night Dana and I were over at our friends Laura and Philip’s house, watching Grey’s Anatomy, and I don’t know how the subject came up, but I said, “do you notice that all of the problems with, and the solution to your vagina all involve yogurt? The entire room just broke up, and as I fight my way through my period and my augmentin it wouldn’t hurt to get some Activia to avoid the Diflucan train. Bad things happen in threes. Bank on it.

Boy, this Komodo Dragon cofee is really hitting the spot, like that commercial for White Castle in “Harold and Kumar” where the boys are staring at the television when the announcer says, “do you want the perfect food?” The boys are just staring at the TV in awe and wonder, and I am staring at my coffee in the same way. It may be the cold medication (sans codeine- it’s daytime), but I look just like them.

As an aside, Kal Penn has joined the cast of “Deadbeat” on Hulu, and it is the greatest casting ever, because basically it’s another Kumar-type role. Kal Penn is just one of those guys that I’d love to be my friend, but unfortunately, I think he’s already moved from DC, so the chance of us running into each other is fairly slim unless he comes back to work for Indian Affairs for Clinton.

I doubt there will be a department of Indian Affairs under Trump. I was livid when the news came out yesterday that the mayor of London might be “the one exception to the not letting Muslims into the country” rule. Trump is such a sack of shit in an expensive suit with a bad haircut. The only thing he’s ever done well is make fun of himself on Saturday Night Live, and that is not a qualification to be president in the slightest. Although I will say that even though I do not agree with conservatives politically, I do like it when they can let go and laugh at themselves. Mike Huckabee’s appearance on Weekend Update stands up to multiple viewings.

When I was sick this weekend, I stayed in bed and watched the Hulu original “East Los High,” which I thought was going to be like “Stand and Deliver,” and it’s not. It’s a hard, hard look at what really goes on in predominantly Hispanic high schools in LA- teen pregnancy, priest abuse (high rates of Roman Catholicism in those neighborhoods), drug deals and territories. It is everything. Just everything. I wanted to get lost in a world that is not my own, and the story is gripping. The story changes from season to season because the class they’re talking about is the seniors, and as the cast graduates, new actors take the prime roles and the ones from the original cast move into the background. I highly recommend it, but it is unfiltered and raw. If I had a high schooler, I doubt I’d let them watch it unless they were 17 or 18 as well.

It just goes to show how much school districts are part of the problem, because they don’t have the resources to help. These kids have no sex education and think pulling out solves everything. There’s no PTA, because there are no parents with enough time off work to attend. There’s no way to keep these kids safe. They’re on their own, in completely dangerous situations that you’d never want to face with your own child.

And on that note, it’s time for a refill on my coffee and a trip to work. I have my own office, so I am willing to go there and hole up. I can be more productive, and if I’m going to feel like shit, why not feel like shit at work than feel like shit at home? It’s nice to know that even though I’m sick, I’m still making money.

love you miss you mean it. Bryn, if you see this before your lunch break, call me then. I can move stuff around.

I am not well. I think it’s because I put my Zyrtec in a different location than my other pills, thus accidentally taking it out of the rotation… which basically means that Spring is a walking nightmare for me. I need to get back on the bandwagon, because snot continually runs down the back of my throat (ew) and eventually turns into the cough/cold combo that I am currently experiencing. I am also somewhat screwed because I left most of my cold medication in my desk drawer at work. If worst comes to worst, I’ll go back to Walgreen’s and buy some more. Right now, the Sudafed, nose spray, and Throat Coat tea with brandy are doing its job. The recipe is just a splash of brandy (maybe a a shot) for four 12 oz cups of tea. I also brew the Throat Coat incredibly strong… four teabags to a pot and steeped for fifteen minutes. Except for using brandy instead of whiskey, it tastes just like the hot toddies Dana used to make me, and it makes me feel good that I can replicate her recipe, because they work.

The only difference is that I put Splenda in mine. It is so, so good. Sweet licorice and, well, I don’t have the box in front of me, so I can’t tell you what else is in it, because the sweet licorice is the overwhelming flavor. Maybe I should try ouzo next time just to punch it up.

I am a huge herbal liqueur fan. Fernet, Campari, ouzo, doesn’t matter. I am more about the savory than the sweet, unless you can mix them together, like pretzels and M&Ms. I have decided that I like the flavor of alcohol, but not the effects, so most of the time, when I mix a drink, it is mostly non-alcoholic with a splash.. like taking one sip out of a Barq’s can and putting a tiny bit of vanilla vodka over the top. However, that is hard for me to do because I cannot justify spending money on alcohol. I will in a restaurant, but spending money on an entire bottle that will just sit there is not for me. I don’t have room to store it, anyway.

I know that a drink out is more expensive, but then again, there are no leftovers.

The only reason I have brandy now is that I asked the Nassers for some whiskey and they didn’t have any, and free brandy was infinitely superior to dragging my ass to a liquor store.

It’s not as much of a chore as it once was, having a car now, but when I feel this crappy all I want to do is stay in bed.

Speaking of which, I think it’s time for a nap. I’m sorry there is no brilliance to be had in this entry. Come back later, when I feel like a normal human being again.

Pri-Diddy is coming back sooner than I thought, and she’s not actually moving to Seattle that long. It’s more like a sabbatical. She’s going to spend a few months in Seattle, then Eugene, then San Francisco, then Colombia (where Elena is from). She’s keeping her job, doing some work remotely and if the money runs out, can come home and pick up where she left off. It’s one of the coolest, craziest plans I’ve ever heard, and I’m really excited for her. She said, “I even get to stay in a yurt.” I said, “in Eugene?,” barely containing my laughter. Because of course if you’re going to Eugene, you’re going to stay in a yurt. I also came up with a new nickname for her, because she wants to run on the track at U of Oregon……… wait for it…….

Pri-fontaine.

So my little guru is headed for an entire tour of the Pacific Northwest, including the hippiest place on earth.™ Although you really can’t say you’ve been on a complete tour of the Pacific Northwest until you’ve been to Saturday Market in Eugene, complete with potheads singing anti-war songs that look like they’ve been sitting in that exact spot since 1975.

I just told her to be really careful on the trip from Eugene to San Francisco, to make sure she had chains for her car, and to call ahead and make sure the mountain pass is open that day. The first time I drove to Portland from Houston, it was November and the pass was open, but it was in complete whiteout conditions and I couldn’t even see the end of my car. The hood just floated into nowhere. I went 15 miles an hour for what seemed like an entire day… and then when I looked down at the clock after white knuckling the steering wheel, it had been five hours.

Prianka showed me a video of driving in the Himalayas on the Indian side, and I said, “oh, it’s just like that… except with a guardrail… but it doesn’t matter because you can’t see it anyway.” And as I thought about it, it’s not exactly the same. Mt. Shasta’s passages are much, much steeper. So much so that I never had to use gas while driving back down.

The next time I drove the passes, I was astounded at how beautiful they were… like, enough to just want to pull over and build a house. It was summer, so the flora was in its fullest form, and it was finding where God lives (in a yurt, probably).

After that, I became all about the pagan celebrations as well as the Christian ones. I’ve done Solstice and Beltane and all the rest, for thou art the same God…… and if you can finish that sentence, you’re probably an Episcopalian.

Prianka is also going to do some running. Hood to Coast was already full, but there are plenty more, and her trainer is wanting to get her out on steeper terrain to prepare. Good luck, God bless. Come get me when you’re ready to eat chocolate.

All the anxiety and panic I had that Pri was never coming back melted in an instance, because I knew it logically, but I had to sit with her and hear all about her adventures before I knew it emotionally. Pri and Elena eventually want to have children, and they want to be with their families when they do. It’s not forever. It just may seem like it. 😛

Sometimes you just need to go to Starbucks and write with a Venti Italian Roast in front of you to try and get so wired you’re not going to cry. I’ve taken all the medicine I can take in terms of anti-anxiety, and physically it is helping as I roil on the insides with memory. My guru, Pri Diddy, is moving to Seattle of all places. Seattle. Three years ago, I would have been a little over three hours from her. Now I am going to be a lifetime away, as Bryn can attest, because the time difference is killing us. In order to keep my routine going, I am usually in bed between 6:00-7:00 PM her time. If I call her before work, it’s 4-5:00 AM her time, and she works as well. With my family, it’s different because it’s only an hour. Three is pushing it, just like when Diane and I were on opposite sides of the country and trying to make room for each other in our lives. It’s never gotten any easier, and that was 15 years ago. I do like Seattle, though, so maybe a visit is in order after some time has passed. I don’t have much vacation at work, but eventually I will, and there’s a few old haunts that I’d like to visit, particularly the EMP (Experience Music Project). It won’t be so bad. Prianka knows that DC is home, and wants to come back to be with her family at some point, but I’ll be waiting a little minute. I found out on Instagram, but I know that social media is the easiest way to get information out to everyone at once, so I wasn’t angry. Just sad. She owed me a phone call just as much as she owed everyone else, which is no one.

When you get into the cycle of trying to call people, you invariably run into the people that want to talk you out of it, and the decision was already made with finality. The people that wanted me to keep working on my relationship with Dana alternated between “think of all the years you’ve already had together” and “it’s ok that she hits you a little bit.” That might be overstating a little, but at the same time, it wasn’t a fight I could just look past and pretend it didn’t happen, especially since that fight didn’t start emotionally. It started over money and devolved into emotion, something I never wanted. I wanted facts. I didn’t find out that we weren’t financially stable until I’d already left Alert Logic, and I wanted to know where the money went. Her answer was to beat me over the head with the amount of attention I gave Argo and never answer the question at all.

It was bait-and-switch, and I fell for it. I was so tired. I was so tired of Argo being Dana’s go to emotion when we were fighting, as if our relationship didn’t matter anymore, when in fact, it was everything. Just everything. Writing to Argo in the middle of the night was not the same as being able to go for beers and hug each other at the end of the night and say, “I had a great time. Let’s do this again sometime.” As my relatonship with Dana and with myself spiraled out of control, so did the relationship with Argo, because I was mad at God and everybody without the tools to deal with that anger appropriately. Plus, I was losing the one person that would listen to me as I tried to process the enormity of the situation, because both Argo and I are a handful, especially when talking to *each other.*

Our relationship was easy give-and-take until I opened my big mouth and said that the rabbit hole we were lost in was creating different emotions in me than it was in her and taking an incredible toll on my marriage, because she was the one I was confiding in, for better or for worse. The better was being able to get a different perspective on my marriage. The worse was trying to push her away before she could push me. It worked masterfully well, obviously, because when I came here, Argo thought she needed a restraining order and I thought that was batshit crazy and go ahead and do what you need to do, because I didn’t come here to cramp your style. Even if I’d moved closer to her, the Virginia side where I’d lived before, there was still plenty of room for us both to be us without running into each other accidentally. I know her address, but only because she used PayPal to support my writing and I sent her a thank-you note in return. She hasn’t moved since then, and I still don’t know exactly where the address is in relation to where I used to live, only that it is not anywhere near my old house…. and I have no interest in finding out. It wouldn’t work out well for either one of us, because I am not prepared to be rejected again. I am not ready to cause her even more hurt, intentionally or not. The intentional hurt was a product of “the way I was raised” and the wet cat claws extended feeling of anxiety that said, “push her away, because it’s too hard to ask for what you want.” Because what I wanted at the time was to be left alone to my own devices, and I couldn’t bring myself to ask her to ghost in hopes that Dana would see that I was willing to do anything to get away from the hold she had on me. And the thing is, I could have just said calmly, “could you ghost, because Dana is threatened (without cause) and I cannot be in relationship with both of you because it causes more problems than it solves. At that time, I was not thinking of moving to DC, and my vision was short and impaired for all sorts of reasons that I am still wading through one at a time. The problem with this is that when you tell the truth about yourself, you have to tell the truth about everyone else, and there is too much confidentiality between us to process here. But what I can say is that I stepped into it up to my ass in this latest go-round, and I didn’t even mean to.

As my dad would say, “mean not to.” Sage advice I did not take, when I clearly should’ve. Because maybe those shoots of green would have continued to grow, and we both could have taken off the suits that made us Leslie and Argo. ™ And maybe they wouldn’t have, but at the same time, I lost a precious piece of my life over the last three years, which was having a safe space to say what I wanted, even when the response was negative. I wish I had taken more time to sit with each letter rather than jumping on it right away. I wish I’d been taking Klonopin long ago, because the fight-or-flight would have been beaten out of me long ago. I wonder all the time what would have happened had I gotten the tools to deal with escalation and how to diffuse emotional bombs without escalating right back… because we may never have made the deal to meet in person, but I might have had that friend I could write to for longer than I actually did.

Having Prianka in my life didn’t cure all of that, but it made enormous headway. She is all about the self-improvement, and showed me lots of videos on how to release shame, how to move into the future, how to let go of relationships in which you hope the other person will change and they just won’t. I tried to change everything about myself for the better, so that I could learn to deal with those escalated e-mails in a different way than I had before, and what I learned from that is when those hot buttons came back around, I would regress into my former self rather than being able to apply everything I’d learned. It hurt beyond belief, not because I hurt her, although I’m sure I did. It was more that I’d put an enormous amount of work into myself with therapy and new drugs and yet, when Argo got on her angry bandwagon, it wouldn’t show anymore because of the lens in which she saw me, and acknowledged she always would. Perhaps she was testing me to see if I meant what I said about changing gears, and if so, I failed… mostly because e-mail can only show so much.

Sharing a bacon cheeseburger would have wrought extremely different results, but I cannot help that it will never happen. I can only regret. When I asked her what more she could ask of me, all I basically got back is to “have a nice life.” The only thing I can do from here on out is to have one.

If there is any hope in this garbage dump of a situation, it’s that I’ve made new friends who don’t see me as the person I once was, and enjoy me for who I am. I am doing my best not to ever return to the angry, judgmental dickhead I was to Argo, because it was a side of me I’d never seen before or since. I am almost (almost) happier without her, because her shitty observations of me aren’t running through my head all day, every day… and Prianka was a large part of changing how I saw myself. She reminded me of the loving heart I have always been, hugging me through my darkness and putting it in perspective in terms of how successful I am and how stepping out on a ledge and moving back to DC was brave and strong and all the things I really am without the tint of Argo’s enormous influence on my thought process. For a long time, because she was so smart, so gorgeous, so grounded within herself, I thought her opinions of me mattered more than my opinions of myself. Her reality was not mine, and never would be. I did things that were bad, but at no time did that make me a bad person… that I would recover from the mistakes I made and go on to be the enormous personality I was meant to be. Because mistakes are not the sum total of my personality, and I don’t know how I got there.

In the beginning of my relationship with Argo, she thought I had amazing insights and as we got closer and closer, that devolved into me trying to see the perosnality behind the suit, but she didn’t want to show it to me anymore… and that’s ok. But what was not ok was seeing those shoots of green and not taking them for what they were… an enormous I’m sorry and I never want our relationship to be what it was.

But again, when my buttons were pushed, I didn’t take enough time to sit in her words, reflect on them, before the cortisol and sin began racing through my body and The Incredible Hulk had nothing on me. It was the definition of the word regret, and I couldn’t live my life with that much of it. I had to step away for my own sanity, and probably for hers, because I doubt that she liked being that person to me any more than I liked being that person to her.

I sat in the cold of winter hoping for spring, and in some ways, I won’t stop hoping that as I get further and further away from the person I used to be, that she’ll see it. But I am not counting my chickens before they hatch, because I don’t want to fall into old patterns with Argo any more than I want to fall into old patterns with Dana.

So tonight I am going to dinner with Pri-Diddy, in hopes we can work out a way to be the virtual friends we were for many years before I was folded into the family, knowing that a real friendship will come back into play when she and Elena make the decision to move back.

I know I’d be out after one or two Seattle winters. The weather literally made me sick, and while I would not wish that upon anyone, I do know that it’s hard not to let the months and months of darkness get to you. So perhaps they’ll move somewhere sunny, and I can meet up with them then, as well.

It’s nice to have enough money to dream…. and dream bigger than I ever have before. This is not the end, but a great new beginning. I just wish it hadn’t come so soon after I moved here, because there is nothing like going to lunch with Prianka and coming away like I am six feet tall and bulletproof, not allowing anything to get in my way.

Amen.

There are very few things that I enjoy more than being a counselor for the youth group at my church, but last night was the best meeting I’ve attended so far. Not that the others are far behind it, but this one was truly amazing. The kids were engaged, and asked more questions than you can possibly imagine. I am glad that whatever negative feelings I had over not getting the youth director job myself melted into a mentor/student relationship with Susannah, the actual youth pastor, because she is teaching me a new way of moving about the world. Her style is completely different than mine, because she is always watching and waiting for the kids to respond, whereas I have a much more active style that sometimes lends itself to more control than the kids really need. I don’t want to make them afraid to speak out, and at the same time, there has to be a balance between discipline and freedom. For instance, if we’re doing something serious, everyone has to put their phones in a box at the front of the room, even Susannah and me. We all signed the “constitution of youth group,” and one of those tenets was to be present in an absolute way. It’s hard to open up to your peers and check your Facebook page all at once. I know me. I’ve seen me do it.

But what was different about last night was that a Jewish youth group came to visit and taught us about all kinds of culture. Our church would be the equivalent of Reform Judaism, the most liberal of liberal Christians. Theirs was quite different, representing Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform all at the same time. I couldn’t imagine a youth group that incorporated everyone from the Church of Christ to the United Church of Christ, which seem similar in name but are at opposite sides of the spectrum in terms of belief. If these kids can do it without clashing with each other, surely so can we… Someday. We shall see what we shall see. I have been approached by the nominating committee about joining Christian Ed, which does not exclusively deal with teenagers, but Susannah attends the meetings, so at least it is some sort of umbrella. I’ve also started putting a lot more money than normal in the offering plate, and am considering a tithe because our budget shortfall is to the point where we are considering cutting positions just to save money. It would be easy for me considering I don’t have any utility bills except my mobile phone and my car insurance, and any money I put in the offering plate or pledge in in essence, feeding my youth group as well, so we can offer programs just like this.

For instance, the Orthodox boy put on his Tefillin, wrapping the leather straps around his arm, and pretty much everyone in the room dropped their jaws with wide-eyed interest. He said that it was a reminder that he was in prayer, to keep him focused on the task at hand. He also said that he has special prayers in Hebrew that go with it, but if there’s something he has to tell God, he just says it. The practice is not limited to the prayers already set forth. The kids asked all sorts of important questions, like whether you could take the scrolls out of the boxes and look at them. He said no, because to touch them is to possibly wear them out faster, but that he does take his in to a professional every five to seven years to make sure that the scrolls aren’t damaged.

They also took turns describing the Jewish life cycle- that for boys, the circumcisions and naming ceremony have to be done within roughly a week after birth, and for girls, the naming ceremony has to take place roughly two weeks afterward.

Then, they asked for volunteers, and married two of our kids under a cloth Chuppah, explaining what goes on during a Jewish wedding. One of the things I learned is that the breaking of the glass when stepped on is not about supporting the marriage, but remembering the sadness of not having a temple anymore… that the Western Wall is the only thing left.

Lastly, they talked about death, and how the body must be buried as soon as possible, and that there is a special group of people tasked with preparing the body for burial in its plain wooden box, no adornments for the Jessica Mitford classic “beautiful memory picture” that funeral homes are so adept at selling. One of the most meaningful things to me is that a man is supposed to be buried in the same clothes in which he got married, completing the life cycle. Also, the body is never left alone. I quipped to Pastor Mark, “did they have to start that before or after Jesus?” I am guessing it was a thousand years before, but at the same time, it was hilarious to me that the people might have to sit with the body to make sure they don’t get away. Obviously, it’s been done.

One of the questions that Pastor Mark asked that I thought was poignant and relevant was during the Q&A afterward… “is there anything you’d like to know about us? I was amazed at how much information our kids were able to pass on, considering that as a youth minister, you never know what’s going to stick and what’s not. We talked about the difference between commercial Christmas and religious Christmas, and I think we opened some eyes that way. You mean it’s not all about Santa?

They also wanted to know if we had special prayers before and after meals, in the morning, etc. Great questions, and truly insightful.

One of the girls was named Arial (pronounced ARE-e-el), and I told her to look up whom I consider “my Rabbi,” because her congregation rented space in Bridgeport and I loved going to schul on Friday nights. In their congregations, they do it a bit differently. At sunset, they have prayers and dinner with their families, and go to schul on Saturday mornings. “My synagogue” did schul on Friday nights and Torah/Talmud study on Saturday. It was an interesting thing to learn that not all synagogues do it the same way. The other thing I learned is that the bar/bat mitzvah readings are not based on each kid, but the portion of the Pentateuch that is being read that Friday/Saturday.

The hardest part for me was when they read the Kaddish in Hebrew, because there is so much sadness in my life right now… relationships that dig deep into my soul because they are deaths of a sort. The people didn’t die, but their relationships to me did.

And then we switched topics to learning the alefbet, and being able to write our names in Hebrew. It was just an amazing evening, and even the adults were blown away by the kids’ poise in talking about their faiths. It reminded me of the documentary Trembling Before Hashem, where gay Jews talk about their faiths and the way they’ve been rejected by their communities. Of course, Reform Judaism is completely fine with the gays, but Orthodox is not. It is just as frightening to come out as a gay Orthodox Jew as it is to come out as a gay Southern Baptist… but at the same time, it teaches all kinds of Judaic beliefs in the process. It was a documentary that I would have liked to recommend, but I couldn’t remember if it was kid-friendly or not. I think it is, but I wasn’t going to recommend it if I didn’t remember clearly.

The point was to learn from each other, and it worked masterfully well. We decided that this was just the beginning of the conversation, and we’d be meeting again later. Youth group does not meet in the summer, so perhaps when we start up in the fall. It gave me a lot to think about, and for that, I am extremely grateful. The one joke I didn’t make is that perhaps they should read a bit of the New Testament just for fun, because the sequel is just as good.

When I study scripture, I have a Jewish annotated version of the New Testament, and it has been invaluable to me in terms of commentary and learning the Hebrew words for things that Jesus would have used, being a Jew himself.

I also think that we need to invite a group of Muslim kids to visit as well, because even Jesus used the word “Aalah” in reference to the Abramic god. In Islam, it is spelled “Allah,” but that is just a translation from the Aramaic. Interfaith dialogue is just indispensable, both for me and the generation of Christians I’m trying to shape. It is so much more satisfying to focus on everything that we have in common, rather than the things that blow us apart. We all come from the same point in time, when God chose Abraham as the father of both Judaism and Islam, and later on, when Jesus’ new church emerged as a sect of Judaism and slowly created a revolution of its own.

The revolution was not televised, and yet, here we are, quoting Jesus thousands of years later. Quoting the same prophets that Jesus himself would have read. I imagine him as a young boy asking the four questions at Passover, and possibly opening the door for Elijah. I remember when I did it. We had a seder at our church in Naples, and for some reason, I was deathly scared that someone was actually at the door. Oh, the things that little kids think…….

And after last night, I realized that I thought I knew, but I really didn’t know anything… a teachable moment from those younger and wiser.

Amein.

Ok, so the last hymn is listed as “Londonderry Air,” so I looked in the back of the hymnal in the hymn tune section, and it wasn’t there. So I got out my phone and looked it up.

Big. Mistake.

I start laughing and I can’t stop. Tears are running down my face and no sound will come out. My nose starts to run and I cannot stand it. I am just about to die of asphyxiation from trying to stop laughing when David, the guy next to me, asks what’s so damn funny.

The last hymn is to the tune of “O Danny Boy.” When I tell him, the laughter starts all over again.

So it gets to the end of the service and when the last phrase comes around, several people around me miss the high note by A LOT, and I just collapsed onto the pew, laughing so hard that David is clearly trying not to kick me. I can’t see, I can’t breathe, I just cannot even. And of course, when something is not supposed to be funny, it makes me laugh even harder because it’s inappropriate.

Who in their right minds wrote a hymn to the tune “O Danny Boy?” I don’t know my hymnody, so perhaps it was a hymn long before it became a bar song that makes Irish drunks cry… but that is not a song you give to non-singers and make the last phrase hit a high F or something crazy like that… and then modulate a whole step higher. Even the tenors in the crowd (and I use that term loosely) are having trouble with it, so none of us are safe.

I finally got my snot together and finished it, because I knew I could help keep everyone on pitch…. and then my voice cracked and I fell over again, unable to keep the tears of laughter from running down my face.

This is only something I would do if I was trying to punk the senior pastor. I look up, and he can see me, and he’s trying not to laugh… not because he knew what was funny, but because laughter is contagious.

I think next week the last hymn is “My Way.”

I was looking at my memories today, watching Kristie and ___ and me duke it out over privacy issues that spanned from the first to the fourth amendment. My take on it that day was that you could say whatever you wanted in the privacy of your own home, and not in the public forum… but someone recording it released it to the public and therefore, violated right to privacy.

But I don’t care about that. I care about the name that goes in the space… another friend I lost on Facebok that I sit in the muck about, hoping to grow flowers in a rich, alive soil. After telling me that she was going to deactivate her Facebook account, I blocked her, because I didn’t think it mattered anyway. I was tired of getting in trouble at work for too much chatting, not enough paying attention. I wanted to fly under the radar with g-mail, but she flipped her shit. I also knew that not seeing her status updates, not seeing her name in my Facebook feed was the right thing to do, so I wouldn’t be tempted to comment on damn near everything. Being tracked on social media by your job is not my idea of a good time.

This was years ago, and so I’d gotten over it by now, but seeing her name in the comments was a way to rip off the band-aid and scratch off the scar. It’s only a flesh wound.

But starting shit over something that benign was unnecessary and petty. If you tell me you’re going to deactivate your account, what does it fucking matter? It was benign on my end, but not so much on hers… and it wasn’t like we ceased communication after that, anyway. We just switched platforms, for what I ws grateful. All I really wanted to do was block her from chat, but I couldn’t figure out how to do that without blocking her from my friends list. I probably should have looked into that a little more.

But I can’t stress enough how much it hurt that she thought I was doing something to hurt her.

So be careful with that social media crap. As I have learned, people tend to think what you’re saying is all about them, when in reality, it’s all about you and what you need to convey. But perception is reality, and I don’t pay much attention to that rule, because I know myself. I know that I am a lot clearer in writing than I am when I am speaking, because I’m not on the spot.

Writing: You are such a beautiful soul that I can’t imagine life without you.

Speaking: Ummmm, ahh… stammer stammer “you want some chili fries? I have a coupon.”